On my Bedside Table

Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead

2009-03-25T17:30:00.000-07:00

By Christine Wicker

I get the biggest kick out of the fact that New York State was the epicenter of new age freakiness in the latter half of the 19th century. Vegetarians, free-love cults, spiritualists -- all had upstate NY as their stomping grounds. Lily Dale is an outpost that survives to this day. I'll have to go visit.....

The Man in the Dark

2009-03-19T04:18:00.000-07:00

by Paul Auster

There's an awful lot of stories going on in this slim volume, and they all kind of fight each other for space and attention. It's not a bad read, but it tries too hard. And the part where the granddaughter quizzes August about his relationship with her grandmother seem unformed, like you're reading character sketch notes that would have gone into writing the finished version...

The Colony

2009-03-15T11:56:00.000-07:00

by John Tayman

This is an amazing microhistory of the leper colony at Molokai covering the people, places and public health policy over a two hundred-year span. Father Damien is featured, of course, but Mother Marianne Cope and Joseph Dutton are there as well -- I'd never heard about them before, but they were just as impressive. From the beginning of the colony, when exiles were rowed to shore (or, indeed, heaved overboard near shore) to find no shelter, food, or medical attention waiting for them; to its development into a small, tight-knit community; to the stories of the last remaining colonists who only wanted to live out their remaining days in the place that had become their home -- the story of Molokai is by turns harrowing and moving. And lest you think we've come a long way -- I couldn't believe the note about the CA microbiologist that in the early days of AIDS recommended reviving Molokai as an AIDS colony..
This is a well-documented and researched history, compassionately written.

The Snake Charmer

2009-02-07T11:47:00.000-08:00

A Life and Death in Pursuit of Knowledge
by Jamie James

Picked this one up after a cursory glance -- it looked cool -- a guy stomping around Burma in search of rare species. I was about two pages in when I realized I'd heard the story before in an Outside magazine article a couple of years ago -- an excruciating account of a herpetologists fatal encounter with a many-banded krait, and the heroic but failed attempt of his colleagues to save him. I couldn't finish the article. Just couldn't bear thinking about that they went through (I'll admit I have issues with Outside magazine when they do things that to me almost border on snuff films).

I stuck it out though and made it through the book and I'm glad I did. It was good to know more about what kind of person and scientist Joe Slowinski was, more about his family and the people he worked with. It made it more of a eulogy and less a voyeuristic horror like that article. I also like learning more about the academic scene of the life sciences, what it's like to make your living (or not) doing something that crazy 19th centurey explorer/collectors did. I learned a bit about snake biology and taxonomy too. Definitely a worthwhile read, but not for the squeamish...

Fault Lines

2009-02-06T12:57:00.000-08:00

by Nancy Huston

Wow. I almost didn't make it through the first section of this book, because of the incredibly unappealing, disturbing little boy who was our narrator. Fortunately, you don't see him through the rest of the book as it moves backward in time. It's an interesting conceit, each section goes back a generation through teh same family, telling the story from the point of view of a 6-year-old (who was a parent, grandparent, or great-grandparent in the sections before). It results in a multi-layered, multi-perspective view of each character. It's kind of tough to use 6-year-olds as narrators, though. Sometimes Huston gets it right, sometimes it doesn't ring true, but it definitely makes for a fresh way to view the action. Just work on suppressing the gag reflex in that first section.... oh, and at the end, too, where there's a list of book group questions for discussion.

Winter World

2008-12-07T09:31:00.000-08:00

by Bernd Heinrich
This book rocks. It explores the amazing details of how animals survive the winter and all the various adaptations that involves. As fascinating to me as those details are, even more fascinating are the methods used to learn about them. Most of it involves destroying a little of what you're studying -- killing a bird to see how fast it cools fully feathered vs. plucked, the "grab & stab" technique of checking the temp of wasps emerging from their nest, dissecting crow pellets or kinglet gullets to see what they eat in winter. To know anything, you have to know everything -- dissecting those crow pellets, Heinrich is able to identify every seed he encounters. Much more than "what hibernates, what doesn't" that we might have learned in school. I came away with the impression that there's not just one winter -- there are a million different winters -- the kinglet's winter, the frog's winter, the chipmunk's winter, the honeybee's winter -- even a separate unique winter for every individual within the species. Worlds within worlds. Now I've gotta read a couple of his other books: Why We Run and Mind of the Raven.

1776

2008-12-03T08:56:00.000-08:00

by David McCullough

I picked this up even though (maybe because) I've always found military history to be difficult to engage with. I've never been able to relate enough to make the story really mean anything to me. It can't all be blamed on the writing skills of historians, either. Even Victor Hugo couldn't keep me turning pages readily -- that 50-page chapter in Les Miserables on the battle of Waterloo? I skimmed through it (to the end where two minor characters' stories intersect).

But I figure as time goes by I've got the advantage of perspective and experience. Not of actual warfare, obviously, but experience of enough different people and situations that I should be able to stretch that empathy a little farther.

So I decided to give it a go, and I'm pleased to report that this was a very readable military history that managed to maintain a level of drama even for one not accustomed to appreciating the details of troop movements and tactics. It certainly doesn't hurt to have familiar characters and locations to read about. And 1776 focuses on the year that could easily have ended the revolution -- despite early successes in the siege of Boston, our boys faced defeat after defeat in New York. (But it feels so right to root for the underdog…) I was definitely turning pages -- as things went from bad to worse, I thought the book would end before they turned things around in New Jersey.

The other lovely thing about reading this book was getting a more fleshed out picture of an icon (George Washington). People are always more interesting than symbols -- and seeing Washington at what was arguably his shakiest allows one to better appreciate just how skilled he became. I especially love having a ton of details -- then I can forget my usual percentage and still kind of know something.

There were some details that managed to creep me out, though, in the description of George III. I found it making me think of a modern George…

"He remained a man of simple tastes and few pretensions….Socially awkward at Court occasions--many found him disappointingly dull--he preferred puttering about his farms at Windsor dressed in farmer's clothes….he could be notably willful and often shortsighted, but he was sincerely patriotic and everlastingly duty-bound. 'George, be a King,' his mother had told him. As the crisis in America grew worse, and the opposition in Parliament more strident, he saw clearly that he must play the part of the patriot-king. He had never been a soldier…But with absolute certainty he knew what must be done…"

…I don't know, maybe I'm pushing it. You be the judge….

Stealing Buddha's Dinner

2007-04-24T18:19:00.000-07:00

by Bich Minh Nguyen

The childhood memories of a girl who came to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1975. She touches on the tensions between her family's culture and the culture of her adopted homeland, using food as a framing element. Very nicely done. She takes recollections that are authentically childlike to help us understand from a perspective developed by the wisdom of years what it is like to be part of two cultures, and at home in neither one. We hear her young voice and her current voice equally throughout, and sympathize with them equally too.

It doesn't hurt that I remember the '80s much as she does (as we are not so far apart in age). The details she lays out have all the more punch because of that shared knowledge. It goes without saying that there are things about her experience I can't share, but I feel like I can imagine them a little better after finishing this book.

She also conveys the huge divide between her experience growing up in America, and her parents' experience as refugees. There are things she cannot know about what they went through because the questions are too difficult, both to ask and to answer. Energies are spent on coping with the way things are now, rather than revisiting what they've been through.

There was a family whose kids went to my elementary school who were also from Vietnam (as a matter of fact, their last name was Nguyen too). I found myself thinking about them quite a bit as I read this book -- wondering about their story and wishing I could have come to know them better while I had the chance.

Thought I'd better just jump back in -- some of the books I've read while on hiatus here:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon -- As my boss promised, very different. But I loved it and read it straight through (disappeared upstairs for a good few hours one weekend). The main character and narrator is autistic, and the book is written from his perspective. Amazing how Haddon can write something that is totally not in a normal narrative style, but it still manages to touch on all the points along the way that allow him to tell a story. It feels like the story is going on outside the pages of the book, and you get just enough peeks at it along the way that you can put it together in your head. It's like it's written in another language or something -- very cool.

After This by Alice McDermott. I didn't like this one as much. It was too sad -- all about disappointment and unmet expectations, getting by, making do. It was about how you put your life on pause when situations are not as you would have them. Real life will start "after this..."

Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: the Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland by Bryan Sykes. This one was a fun read, if you're into the vicissitudes of mitochondrial DNA. I really enjoyed it.

The Knitting Sutra: Craft as a Spiritual Practice

2006-12-23T15:53:00.000-08:00

Susan G. Lydon

Blaarrgh. Plenty of gazing into a navel filled with yarn lint in this one. I thought it would have potential, but it wound up just irritating me. Not least because the author cannot seem to settle on one spiritual tradition, but instead offers up a Reader's Digest abridged version of maybe seven different spiritual worldviews and doesn't convince me that she has any commitment or depth of understanding of any of them. Then why bring them up? talk about how knitting brought you through a rough patch, fine, and how you grew through concentration on your craft -- the new agey sampler is hardly necessary.

She certainly is a master knitter, but a spiritual dilettante. Don't know why that bothered me so much, but it did. Seemed to confirm the old saw that the more you say about something, the less you really know.

The Coffee Trader

2006-12-23T15:42:00.000-08:00

by David Liss

Picked this up off the new fiction shelf at the library, um, 'cause I like coffee. And I'd gotten behind in reading fiction, when I'd pledged to read a novel a month.

Really intricate plot on this with lots of crossing and double-crossing. About a Portugese Jewish commodities trader in 17th century Amsterdam and how his fortunes rise and fall (and rise again). Made the stock market sound more interesting than I ever thought it could. It yanks a happy ending out from under you, though. You think everything is going to work out for the protagonist, and it turns out to be a hollow victory. Some wouldn't mind; victory is victory after all, but you just know that the circumstances are going to eat away at our hero and he'll end up hating himself. Left kind of a bitter taste -- a too dark roast perhaps.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

2006-11-28T15:39:00.000-08:00

Michael Pollan

Three meals thoroughly traced through the production chain to their original inputs: a Standard American Diet meal from Mickey D's, a meal cooked at home from organically or sustainably produced foods, and a meal of hunted, foraged or home grown foods.

Lots of requisite horror following the factory farm roots of the Mickey D's meal -- that's been done before and more thoroughly in other books. The thing that got to me from this section was summed up by a farming activist Pollan quotes: "we're still eating the leftovers of World War II." Both chemical fertilizers and pesticides were born of the war's chemical weapons and explosives industries. Fritz Haber, who came up with the process for making nitrogen fertilizer (and won a Nobel Prize in 1920 for his efforts) also used synthetic nitrates to make bombs for Germany during WWII. Another one of his scientific developments was the poison gas they used in concentration camps. All this left me very creeped out.

And from the chemicals used, to the machinery used, to the energy used for transport, the whole enterprise is powered by fossil fuels. We're basically eating petroleum (though it would be more efficient if we could just fill ourselves up at the gas pump along with our cars).

"Big Organic" doesn't come out much better -- it's basically conventional farming minus the fertilizer and pesticides. Still set up as a huge monoculture, the better to allow automation; still with huge energy inputs.

So what's the alternative to factory farming? Pollan takes a closer look at someone who is practicing a potential option when he visits Joel Salatin's farm. I was kind of stunned to realize I'd read a book by Salatin not too long ago -- "You Can Farm." He's a bit of a zealot whose writing style is kooky to say the least, but the work he does is brilliant. He raises pastured cattle, chickens, turkeys, pigs and rabbits, orchestrating a kind of crop rotation to keep the pasture and animals all healthy and doing what they do best. No need for antibiotics, or significant quantities of any animal feed or fuels or fertilizers to be imported and added to what the land already produces.

Pollan's favorite meal is the focus of the last section. For this section he gets bonus points for learning to hunt and doing an admirable and honest job of examining his reaction to the whole process.

also lately finished....
Rational Mysticism
by John Horgan

Sigh. I was hoping that this book would look at enlightenment from a scientific standpoint. I was dying to see what they'd find for handholds to even begin to get a grip on mysticism. As it turns out, the book was primarily about psychedelic drugs. I finished it anyway.

A Spot of Bother

2006-11-14T17:35:00.000-08:00

Mark Haddon

My boss was telling me the other day about a book her book club had read recently-- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Only two people had really liked it, "but you probably would like it, you like off-beat stuff..."

That night I was dropping some stuff off at the library and cruised past the new book shelf. This one caught my eye, then I realized it was by the same author. Picked it up and read it in a day.

I really, really liked this one. It's about how we miss truly connecting with each other by a hair's breadth and wind up lonely in the midst of people we love. It follows 3 couples (a mom& dad, their son & daughter with their respective partners) as the emotional and physical distance between partners grows almost to a breaking point. Then they all manage to come back together just in time for a wedding (the daughter's) -- perfect. The message to all -- listen to one another, say what you really feel, stop being stupid and messing up your relationships for the sake of saving face -- pay attention to what is really important. Good advice all round.

A Death in Belmont

2006-11-10T14:51:00.000-08:00

Sebastian Junger

I read an excerpt of this book in Vanity Fair a couple of months ago and it sounded really good. This is the first true crime I've read -- I don't usually go for that sort of thing -- but I really enjoyed it and have been recommending it to everyone at work.

It's about the Boston Strangler murders in the early 60's. Junger's personal angle on the cases is incredible -- when he was an infant, his family hired a contractor to build an addition on their house. One of the workers on the crew was the man who later confessed to being the Boston Strangler -- and during the period he was working for the Junger's, there was a murder in a nearby neighborhood, for which another man was blamed.

Junger follows all the principals in the case to their deaths, and interviews anyone he can with a relationship to those involved. You finish the book and have no idea whether the Junger's neighbor Bessie Goldberg was murdered by Roy Smith (who was jailed for the murder) or Albert DeSalvo (the confessed strangler, who denied any connection later). You do, though, have a beyond-the-headlines sense of the depth and complexity of the people involved and how the socio-political context of the cases affected their outcom (and continued to affect the convicted men till their deaths). A meditation on the unknowable Truth (kind of a Schrodinger's cat thing going on). Not the cheeriest read you could pick up, but it'll keep you in thrall till you finish it.

Playing catch-up

2006-11-02T19:28:00.000-08:00

I just brought home a great arm-load of stuff from the library, but I've vowed not to touch anything until I catch up on my entries here. I've been bad. I've been working on about 4 books at once and stopping a chapter short of the end because I have yet to post about one I finished weeks ago.

So:

The Long Emergency
James Howard Kunstler

Heard this guy on a local radio talk show (he lives in-state) and went out to get the book shortly after. It was a great apocalyptic rant -- I really enjoyed it.

I had a history prof in college that told us that we were all Marxist. When that sent the Reagan-worshiping young republicans into apoplectic fits, he explained that for Marx, the forces that moved history were all economic. (Eventually he had all the RWYR's agreeing that, yeah, they felt the same way -- I loved that little turnabout.) Well, for Kunstler, the forces that move history are all related to fossil fuels -- oil makes the world go 'round. And eventually that oil will run out, and what will we all do then?

I like the geopolitical summary of world events (through oil-colored glasses) that he presents. Then, a section where he systematically takes down any potential alternative energy sources made me wish I knew a little more about the science and, yes, economics behind the subject because bits of his argument felt a little shaky. Then, when he envisions what doom will befall our culture of waste, who wouldn't enjoy it? OK, probably plenty of people don't enjoy that sort of thing, but I did. It made me wish I had saved my babysitting money and gotten the lifetime subscription to Mother Earth News when they were still offering it. His imagining of society post-oil was kind of silly -- it veers between a "Mad Max" landscape and one populated by Jeffersonian gentlemen farmers. But still, overall a good read.

and also:
Assassination Vacation
Sarah Vowell

Picked this one up 'cause it was new at the library and it struck my fancy.
Sarah Vowell is such a history wonk! I had no idea just how deep this went. She has three sections in the book; a separate one for each of the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. She drags friends and relations with her all over the country to visit sites associated with the presidents, their murderers, cabinet members, descendants, and anyone else remotely connected.

But really, if you know enough, everything is connected. It was dizzying, how she jumped around in time and across the miles, zapping little lightning bolts of connection between people, places, and events. I was beginning to think that she knew everything (especially when she provided details about the women who posed for the illustration on a souvenir coaster for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, where McKinley was shot -- a coaster for God's sake!). But the book remains engaging and un-stuffy throughout. Bonus points for the side trip to Philadelphia's Mütter Museum. Right now I have two books in my house that mention the Mütter (the other is Annie Dillard's). I'll have to go there some day...

The Year of Magical Thinking

2006-10-07T06:21:00.000-07:00

Joan Didion

I've been wanting to read this since last fall, when it came out, but it's been hard to get at the library -- always checked out. In fact, multiple copies at multiple branches of our library system have always been out every time I've looked. Lots of people have been reading this. Somehow I felt superstitious about requesting a hold.

Really I've been tiptoeing around wanting to read it because I've been having a hard time dealing with bad news. Whenever I hear about any kind of tragedy or suffering, it stays with me and won't leave me alone. So I thought reading this would really be a wringer.

But really, it didn't have that effect on me, I think because Didion steps back a pace or two from the experience itself in order to look at it and record it. That distance is enough to give you breathing space. With an experience like that I imagine it would be impossible to write (or to move, or to breathe, even) if you didn't separate somewhat from your own grieving self. I don't want to imply that her voice was totally analytical and rational, because it was clear that she was still in the midst of it, but-- there was a bit of separation.

Something that really struck me is how she returns to the motif of marking time. She relates things that happened before her husband died and in the days after to the moment itself, counting down the days, hours, weeks or months that separate the two events. Time stops with the traumatic event, and your life rearranges itself around a new zero point on the number line.

Also recently finished Anger by Thich Nhat Hanh. I think I should probably read it again before I return it because there are definitely a few things in there that I'll want to remember. Also a cool idea inside about writing one's own Heart Sutra to read when you're focusing on negative things and not remembering good things. Think I'll start working on that too...

Never Let Me Go

2006-09-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

Kazuo Ishiguro

I'm really wishing we hadn't just watched a certain recent bad sci-fi movie that happened to have a similar theme.

I find myself thinking, "God, hasn't this been done to death already?" I also found myself getting annoyed by the first-person narrator and her fast-forward/rewind storytelling: "I remember this one time when blah, blah, blah...but that wouldn't have mattered so much if it weren't for what happened next...(blah, blah, blah...)" kind of stuff. That kind of little conceit gets used over and over, and it gets old.

Other than that, I was fascinated by how Kathy, the narrator, is very clued in to what people really mean, as opposed to what they say -- she notes tone of voice, attitude, non-verbal/physical stuff, and manages to figure out what's going on with people as they communicate, sometimes to the point where she knows how they really feel about something even if they aren't aware of it on a conscious level. On the other hand, she doesn't seem to have that level of awareness about her own feelings -- she doesn't even realize
that she is in love with Tommy, and has been for years. There's a total disconnect between her feelings and that analytical part of her mind that figures out how people tick. Probably why she's good at her job. On balance I enjoyed the book even though the narrative style bugged me.

Also recently finished The Art of Raising a Puppy by the Monks of New Skete. What can I say, I do want a dog... Interesting after reading Pack of Two to find many of Caroline Knapps observations echoed by Maurice Sendak, of all people (he got a puppy from the monks, and they visit him and talk to him about his relationship with his dog at the end of the book).

I'm Just Here For The Food

2006-09-19T16:37:00.000-07:00

Alton Brown

Yes, I read a cookbook straight through. Well, to be honest I skimmed some of the recipes a little but I read all the sidebars, theory, and practical application stuff. Including how to build a roasting oven out of firebrick in your carport. (A carport? Must be a southern thing…) Even the kids got into this one. C has been reading it almost as thoroughly as me, and S wants to check out pictures of the exploding guy every other day. Anyone should know that my respect and enthusiasm for AB knows no bounds, but even given my prejudice, this was really, really good.

(the exploding guy pic)

I’ve been debating whether I’m going to include a post for every little thing I read – because I tend to pick up a lot of how-to stuff that I skim through, plus house porn (as small hands terms it) that I just get for the pictures. I don’t know, I might do a month-end summary with brief notes. I want to keep my momentum going, account for everything, but not get bogged down in my reading because I don’t know what I’ll say on the reading blog….

Speaking of porn… let’s do a “quickie” entry on For Women Only by Shaunti Feldhahn (not the Berman and Berman one by the same title, which I’ve also read… for work!) OK, no, that’s a much-too-salacious way to start talking about what was really a pretty inoffensive little book. It’s a “what your husband wished he could tell you, but is afraid to because it would probably be followed by the worst kind of ‘discussion,’ including tears and maybe sleeping on the couch for a few weeks” type of book. I picked it up one day in Kmart, while C was flipping through the magazine rack and read a chunk of it, then found it at the library and finished it off. Somehow I missed the heavy religious slant while thumbing through in Kmart, so I found the author’s recommendation to “sit down and pray before reading on” at the beginning of one particular chapter to be a bit disconcerting. But really, I kind of enjoyed reading this one. It points out what the male gender finds important in a relationship and is very soothing about saying yes, it’s probably different from what you find important but that’s ok – that doesn’t mean either of you are wrong. As for my segue up above – the author does seem to be a little preoccupied with the issue of pornography. She includes a rather atrocious excerpt from her novel at the end of the book – about a Christian husband dealing with “temptation” (i.e. internet porn sites and strip clubs). That was off-putting.

I tend to have a proclivity for picking up books that probably worry J. The above would be one. Also The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman and Nan Silver. Then there was the time I was reading Listening to Prozac (Peter Kramer) and Feeling Good: the New Mood Therapy (by David Burns -- required for a psych class I had in nursing school). That prompted an “is everything ok?” talk. Things are ok – I just read everything. And I hear about so many problems at work that if I weren’t interested in reading about problems too, I’d be at a disadvantage…

Writing to Change the World

2006-09-11T18:25:00.000-07:00

By Mary Pipher

Read Reviving Ophelia ages ago, and thought I'd pick this up to see what she had to say about writing.

And, well, it was kinda clunky. It was OK, but nothing special. Not terribly inspiring either. But I do want to check out The Middle of Everywhere, which she wrote about the immigrant/refugee experience in America -- their interactions mainstream American culture and how they are viewed and dealt with by the rest of us non-first-generation folks. Based on her experience with immigrant communities in her home of Lincoln, Nebraska -- the "middle of nowhere."

Pack of Two

2006-09-09T06:07:00.000-07:00

The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs
by Caroline Knapp

I remember the author from her days as a columnist for the Boston Phoenix. That's kind of why I picked it up, but also because a subset of my longing for a house of my own is wanting to get a dog. The setup -- both her parents die, she gets sober after X number of years of alcohol abuse, she gets a dog. Throughout the book she explores her relationship with the dog and what that relationship means to her at that point in her life. And that's the jumping off point for an exploration of the relationship between people and dogs in general.

She's very good at teasing out all the nuances of this relationship. Boy, you can really tell, though, that she spent years in therapy (no, she doesn't sound really messed up -- she's just got this whole different level of awareness about the meaning behind our responses within a relationship -- where they come from, what they might be doing there).

She also has some breathtakingly scary stories about dysfunctional people and how their issues manifest themselves through their relationships with their dogs. Very entertaining read, but a little bit more than I was looking to get into, I think.

Last Child in the Woods

2006-09-03T18:16:00.000-07:00

by Richard Louv

I picked this up because I heard the author being interviewed on a radio program about half a year ago and it stuck with me. The premise is that kids today don't get outside enough. Soccer practice doesn't count -- it's a qualitatively different experience than exploring, making forts, catching frogs and climbing trees. Our children's lives are poorer because of this. A crucial part of their development -- physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual -- is being stunted because of this lack.

Where do I even start? Argh! He's right! My kids don't go outside enough! And I know what they're missing, because I was a very lucky kid in this regard. All through elementary school I lived in a house next to the school, with fields behind it giving way to the swamp (of course we'd call it wetlands now) which froze over every winter, giving everyone a place to skate and play hockey. You just had to steer clear of all the cattail stubble. There was a willow I used to climb up into so I could survey the fields. At my grandmother's there were woods and a stream behind her house -- that's where all the good salamander hunting was. My dad's house had neighbors on both sides and an apartment building behind, but we would climb over the stone wall that marked the back of our property, cut through the apartment building's lot to get to the park. It had everything -- a big pond, fed by a stream, swampy areas (where you could find tadpoles when I was little -- brush gradually filled that spot in over the years) woods, fields, blueberries on the hill overlooking the pond, mulberry trees, hickory trees.

Over the course of 30 years visiting the park I'd seen deer, rabbits, kingfishers, pheasants, frogs, turtles (once I watched a snapping turtle eating a dead fish underwater). Once after a fresh snowfall I saw where a crow had taken flight -- crow footprints leading up to a perfect, crisp impression of crow wingtips, feathers spread, in the snow. Once after a particularly heavy snowfall (maybe 2 feet) in the clear day that followed I saw 10 or 12 bluebirds -- the first I'd ever seen. They looked like bits of sky flying from branch to branch.

And I pretty much always went exploring on my own. Kids aren't allowed to be on their own these days, and they don't generally have access to the kinds of places I used to hang out, and they'd rather be on the computer. The world changed while we weren't looking, and no one asked if we wanted it this way.

So my kids are having a very different childhood than I had. But I had a different childhood than my parents -- my mom grew up on a farm. I missed out on a lot by not having a chance to do that. And I was so jealous of my uncle who was in 4H and had his own flock of sheep to take care of.

But our kids are overscheduled to a ridiculous degree in structured activities that basically demand they perform to a certain standard -- and they don't get a chance to just hang out with no agendas to fulfill. And I don't know how to fix it. I work full time. I come home and work some more. When I was a kid, the number one time to get sent out to play was when the kitchen floor was being washed -- but I don't send my kids out while I do housework.

Louv presents ideas for contering this deficit. They involve restructuring school curriculae, redesigning suburbia, basically reimagining society. I don't know if we have the will to do that. Don't know that anyone cares that much. When we buy a house, though, I'm holding out for one that backs up to woods or fields.

The Librarians of Alexandria

2006-08-19T10:27:00.000-07:00

by Alessandra Lavagnino

Is it too late to add a New Year's resolution? I really have to work at picking up more fiction -- I want to resolve to read a novel a month. So here's one for August. I don't know what it is with me and fiction -- I didn't even really start this one until it was almost due back at the library. So I had to renew it when I was about two-thirds of the way through it.

The girl that renewed it for me asked me what I thought about it. I was having a hard time getting into it. Usually I reach a point by 50 or 75 pages in where the story starts to pull me along, but with this one I was about 150 pages in before it stopped feeling like work.

She agreed that it did feel like work to read -- for her it was because it kept jumping from family to family and by the time a character reappeared it was hard to pick up the thread again.

I had to admit with some embarrassment that I was having trouble keeping the names straight -- it was like reading Russian literature or something, I had to really work at figuring out who we were talking about. Didn't think I'd have that problem with Italian names.

I picked this one up because I'd heard that the author really captures a sense of place well, bringing it to life with her details. And indeed, the setting were beautiful, but I can't really vouch for how well she captured them, because I've never been to Alexandria, or Rome, or Palermo.

So that's where things stood when I renewed it -- then I turned the corner into where she isn't jumping from family to family, but ties them all together around one broken marriage, viewed through the eyes of the couple's 10-year-old daughter. And again, she uses layers and layers of detail to capture a character and her reactions this time rather than the setting. And this is a place I have been to, so I can say it's uncanny how real it is on the page.

Everything this girl thinks, all her responses and actions, they're all true. I remember it being exactly that way. That sense of no longer being your authentic self, because you are forced to constantly play a role based on what's expected of you or what those close to you want to hear. All the people and places familiar to you are still there, but forever changed by what's happened -- they're given back to you broken. How this all makes you a different person than you were before.

I don't know how she wrote this. I didn't remember it until I read it -- I can't take myself back to my 10-year-old self. How did she do it?

Not easy to read, the last part, but I couldn't stop. Ugh. Now I feel like I've been on a therapist's couch for the two days it took me to finish the book.

One final note -- the thing that interests me most about the author is that she was "a biologist and professor of parasitology at the University of Palermo until her retirement, she is also the author of more than 50 papers on tropical diseases." Cool!

The Virgin of Bennington

2006-08-12T06:25:00.000-07:00

by Kathleen Norris

I picked this one up on the strength of The Cloister Walk, which I read a few years back, and I guess I was expecting it to be more of the same. It took me a while to get into it because the early chapters talk about the type of person she was when she first went away to college at Bennington in the late 60’s – she was a very sheltered Midwestern girl, very unprepared for the scene she was immersed in. In fact, she seemed to be quite unprepared for any sort of experience at all – everything seemed to be somehow much more difficult and stressful for her than it needed to be. All this was rather exasperating to read, but it was saved by the fact that she didn’t seem to have any self-pity in reflecting on that time in her life. It seemed that she was giving an honest appraisal of herself.

I enjoyed the book much more once she got to describing her experiences at work at the Academy of American Poets. The book stops being about her and becomes a memoriam to her mentor and employer, Betty Kray. Betty Kray is like NYC’s version of Sylvia Beach, but the champion of poets rather than ex-pat authors; the midwife of 20^th century American poetry. I love books that make me realize how little I know – I’d never heard of Betty Kray, but after reading this I’m so glad to have learned something about her.

The other thing I enjoyed about the book was its portrayal of the NYC literary scene, and what a small world it seemed – the irony of a huge city is that it supports microcosms – as Norris puts it: a “small town” of people with shared interests, with a small-town atmosphere of connections and support as well as small-town politics and power issues.

There was a lot of name dropping going on in the NYC section of the book and it impressed me how the literary world intersected with other groups and things going on in the city. There was a nice mix of high culture and pop culture going on in Norris’ life –poets and their work for her day job and nights partying in the realm of Bob Dylan, Warhol, and the Velvet Underground.

Overall rating – not a waste of time, learned something worthwhile.