A Year of Reading: Books Read 2025

Before I had started reading

A year ago this month, in January of 2025, I began writing a line or two or three of description for each book read, but that only lasted a month, and beginning in February I went back to the more bare-bones author, title (fiction/nonfiction, year) format. Some of these were re-readings, and you will see occasional binges. Many of the books in this list I discussed on blog posts in 2025, and you can use the search bar at the top of the blog to find those posts where they exist. Want to know more? A couple books on the list I might not remember at all, but you can ask! Here then are the books I read over the last twelve months.

View from bank to harbor on a December morning

1. Thomas, Kai. In the Upper Country (fiction, 2023). Brilliant novel of refugees from American slavery who joined forces over generations with indigenous peoples of the U.S. and Canada in a quest for freedom. Tales within tales. A tour de force. 

2. Reade, Charles. The Cloister and the Hearth: A Tale of the Middle Ages (fiction, 1861). Picaresque historical novel set in the late 1400s, with every element a reader could ever desire. Adventure, love, humor, philosophy, description, atmosphere, etc.

3. Estes, Eleanor. The Moffats (juvenile fiction, 1941). Every now and then I re-read the always charming books about the Moffat and Pye families, enjoying Louis Slobodkin’s simple illustrations as much as the stories I first discovered in grade school. For me, they never grow old 

4. Lane, Eric & Michael Oreskes. The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved Our Country and Why It Can Again (nonfiction, 2007). The authors stress that many compromises were necessary for the Constitution to come into being in the first place and that its structure of checks and balances were designed to prevent despotism. Recent and current winner-take-all strategies from the White House, in Congress, and in a loaded Court system have all been partisan attempts in recent decades to short-circuit what the authors of this book call our Constitutional Conscience. Full text of the United States Constitution included as an appendix. 

5. Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep (nonfiction, 1987). The second book of memoir from this prolific author (she wrote and had published over 60 books, both fiction and nonfiction) tells of her childhood and young womanhood, and motherhood, covering years in India, England, and Kashmir. 

6. Barr, Nevada. Firestorm (fiction, 1996). Although the firestorm in this novel was confined to wilderness and did not touch urban areas, descriptions of the blaze and its aftermath were difficult to read as fires raged in the L.A. area this January. 

7. Gilbert, Elizabeth. Committed: A Love Story (nonfiction, 2010). Memoir plus explorations of the history of marriage, along with customs in a couple of other countries the author and her then-future husband visited.

8. Wang, Qian Julie. Beautiful Country (nonfiction, 2021). Another memoir, this one from a young woman who came to the U.S. from China with her mother to join her father who had come before. 

9. Orcutt, William Dana. From My Library Walls: A Kaleidoscope of Memories (nonfiction, 1945). Where did he find room for bookshelves with all the portraits and framed letters he had hanging on his library walls?

10. Lenski, Lois. Houseboat Girl (fiction – juv., 1957). Simple story and simple illustrations tell of a vanished way of American life. (Now, if only I could find my copy of  Phyllis Crawford’s Hello, the Boat!)

11. Gilbert, Elizabeth. Signature of All Things (fiction, 2013). Enormous canvas brilliantly executed.

12. Smith, Alexander McCall. The Enigma of Garlic (fiction, 2022). Comforting, as his books generally are.

13. Hamilton, Mary Mann. Trials of the Earth (nonfiction, 1992/2017). One woman’s life, working and raising a family in Arkansas and the Mississippi Delta in the late 1800s.

14. Hughes, Sian. Pearl (fiction, 2024). A small book but not slight, this novel gains substance as it goes along.

15. Harrison, Jim. Dalva (fiction, 1988)

16. Ahmed, Samira. This Book Won’t Burn (fiction, 2024)

17. Houston, James. Ghost Fox (fiction, 1977)

18. Eig, Jonathan. King: A Life (nonfiction, 2024)

19. Kaur, Valarie. See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love (nonfiction, 2020)

20. Stander, Aaron. Smoke and Mirrors (fiction, 2024)

21. Maxwell, William. The Chateau (fiction, 1961)

22. Carter, Jimmy. Keeping Faith (nonfiction, 1982)

23. Brooks, Geraldine. Memorial Days (nonfiction, 2024)

24. Braun, Lilian Jackson. The Cat Who Went Up the Creek (fiction, 2002)

25. Benedict, Marie & Victoria Christopher Murray. The Personal Librarian (historical fiction, 2021)

26. Wilkerson, Charmaine. Black Cake (fiction, 2022)

27. Christie, Agatha. The Clocks (fiction, 1964)

28. Egan, Timothy. Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis (nonfiction, 2012).

29. Stark-Nemon, Barbara. Hard Cider (fiction, 2018)

30. Anderson, Peter. Heading Home: Field Notes (nonfiction, 2017).

31. Hesse, Hermann. Steppenwolf (fiction, 1927)

32. Base, Ron. The Dame with the Sanibel Sunset Detective (fiction, 2017).

33. Base, Ron. The Two Sanibel Sunset Detectives (fiction, 2013)

34. Base, Ron. The Hound of the Sanibel Sunset Detective (fiction, 2014)

35. Base, Ron. The Four Wives of the Sanibel Sunset Detective (fiction, 2015).

36. Zimmerman, Marilyn. In Defense of Good Women (fiction, 2025, ARC)

37. Base, Ron. The Sanibel Sunset Detective Goes to London (fiction, 2016)

38. Ardizzone, Heidi. An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (nonfiction, 2007)

39. Farjeon, J. Jefferson. Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story (fiction, 1937)

40. Reich, Robert B. Aftershock (nonfiction, 2010).

41. Cook, Olive. Breckland (nonfiction, 1956)

42. Williams, Niall. This Is Happiness (fiction, 2019)

43. Smith, Ali. There but for the (fiction, 2011)

44. Perkins, Lynne Rae. At Home in a Faraway Place (fiction, juv., 2025)

45. Hudson, Marjorie. Indigo Field (fiction, 2023)

46. Dobyns, Jay. No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels (nonfiction, 2009)

47. Brooks, Robert R. R. A Tumult of Years (nonfiction, 1980)

48. Dutourd, Jean. Pluche, or the Love of Art (fiction, 1970)

49. Sweet, Melissa. Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White (nonfiction, 2016)

50. Sherratt, Yvonne. Hitler’s Philosophers (nonfiction, 2013)

51. Bennett, Arnold. Riceyman Steps (fiction, 1923)

52. Bennett, Arnold. The Card (fiction, 1911)

53. Bennett, Arnold. Imperial Palace (fiction, 1930)

54. Davies, Robertson. What’s Bred in the Bone (fiction, 1985) 

55. Parini, Jay. Benjamin’s Crossing (fiction, 1997)

56. Benjamin, Walter. Berlin Childhood around 1900 (nonfiction, 2006 Am. ed.)

57. Behrman, S.N. Duveen (nonfiction, 1952)

58. Levi, Lia; trans. Antony Shugaar. The Jewish Husband (fiction, 2009)

59. Milne, Christopher. The Path Through the Trees (nonfiction, 1979)

60. Base, Ron. The Sanibel Sunset Detective Returns (fiction, 2011)

61. Tomkins, Calvin. Living Well is the Best Revenge (nonfiction, 1971)

62. Cambridge, Colleen. Mastering the Art of French Murder (fiction, 2023)

63. Atkinson, Kate. Behind the Scenes at the Museum (fiction, 2020)

64. Cambridge, Colleen. A Murder Most French (fiction, 2024)

65. Trollope, Fanny. Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)

66. McMurtry, Larry. The Last Kind Words Saloon (fiction, 2014)

67. Ofaire, Cilette, trans. Beren Van Slyke. The San Luca (nonfiction, 1935)

68. Gerber, Dan. A Voice from the River (fiction, 2005)

69. Clarke, Stephen. A Year in the Merde (fiction, 2004)

70. Stimson, James A. King Noanett: A Story of Old Virginia and the Massachusetts Bay (fiction, 1896)

71. Mulvahill, Karen. The Lost Woman (fiction, 2025).

72. Trueblood, Valerie. Criminals: Love Stories (fiction, 2016)

73. Daudet, Alphonse. Lettres de mon moulin (nonfiction, 1869)

74. Seth, Vikram. The Golden Gate (fiction/sonnets, 1986)

75. Bennett, Leslie K. Peaks & Valleys (fiction, 2024).

76. McMurtry, Larry. Lonesome Dove (fiction, 1985)

77. Everett, Percival. James (fiction, 2024)

78. Buck, Pearl S. My Several Worlds: A Personal Record (nonfiction, 1954)

79. Mason, Miriam E. Caroline and Her Kettle Named Maud (fiction, juv, 1965)

80. Bayles, David & Ted Orland. Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (nonfiction, 2001)

81. Swanson, Julie A. North of Tomboy (fiction, 2025)

82. Bell, J.H. The Dish Boat (fiction, 1943)

83. Butterworth, Oliver. The Enormous Egg (fiction – juv., 1956)

84. Kipling, Rudyard. The Second Jungle Book (fiction, 1895)

85. Zuravleff, Mary Kay. American Ending (fiction, 2023)

86. Walker, Martin. The Templars’ Last Secret (fiction, 2017)

87. McNeer, May. Give Me Freedom (nonfiction – juv., 1964)

88. Oakley, Mary Ann B. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (nonfiction, 1972)

89. Clark, Jennifer. Kissing the World Goodbye (nonfiction, 2022)

90. Eggers, Dave. Zeitoun (nonfiction, 2009)

91. Lerner, Betsy. The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers (nonfiction, 2000)

92. Lopez, Barry. About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (nonfiction, 1998)

93. Garner, Bryan A. & David Foster Wallace. Quack This Way (nonfiction, 2013)

94. Brooks, David. The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (nonfiction, 2019)

95. Lawrence, D.H. Etruscan Places (nonfiction, 1932)

96. Anderson, Joan. A Year by the Sea (nonfiction, 1999)

97. Fuentes, Robert “Carlos.” The Vacation: A Teenage Migrant Farmworker’s Experience Picking Cherries in Michigan (nonfiction, 2025)

98. Mulherin, Timothy. This Magnetic North: Candid Conversations on a Changing Northern Michigan (nonfiction, 2025)

99. Dykeman, Wilma. The French Broad (nonfiction, from “Rivers of America” series, (1955)

100. Erdrich, Louise. The Bingo Palace (fiction, 1993)

101. Shingarev, A.I. The Shingarev Diary (nonfiction, 1978)

102. Youngquist, Mark D. My Joy Journey with Amy (nonfiction, 2025)

103. Terkel, Studs. Hope Dies Last (nonfiction, 2003)

104. Mosley, Walter. Farewell, Amethystine (fiction, 2024)

105. Myette, Jack. Prison: The Inside Story—Transforming Lives as an Officer and Educator (nonfiction, 2025)

106. Kemelman, Harry. Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red (fiction, 1973)

107. Ibid. Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet (fiction, 1976)

108. Ibid. Thursday the Rabbi Walked Out (fiction, 1978)

109. Ibid. Someday the Rabbi Will Leave (fiction, 1985)

110. Wilkerson, Charmaine. Good Dirt (fiction, 2025)

111. Jacobs, A.J. Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection (nonfiction, 2012)

112. Byfield, Barbara Ninde. A Parcel of Their Fortunes (fiction, 1979).

113. Tyler, Anne. Clock Dance (fiction, 2018)

114. Williams, Niall. The Year of the Child (fiction, 2024)

115. Forbes, Kathryn. Mama’s Bank Account (1943)

116. Mosley, Walter. Little Green (fiction, 2013)

117. Camus, Albert, trans. Matthew Ward. The Stranger (fiction, this edition 1993)

118. McHugh, Ernestine. Love and Honor in the Himalayas: Coming to Know Another Culture (nonfiction, 2001)

119. Dahl, Roald. Boy (nonfiction, 1984)

120. Williams, Niall. History of the Rain (fiction, 

121. Whybrow, Helen. The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life (nonfiction, 2025)

122. Backman, Fredrick. Britt-Marie Was Here (fiction, 2016)

123. Harris, Kai. What the Fireflies Knew (fiction, 2022)

124. White, E.B., ed. Martha White. E.B. White on Dogs (nonfiction, 2013)

125. Styron, William. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (nonfiction, 1990)

126. Camus, Henri. Le premier homme (fiction, 1994)

127. Waganese, Richard. Medicine Walk (fiction, (fiction, 2016)

128. Paul, Elliot. The Last Time I Saw Paris (nonfiction, 1942)

129. Lanham, J. Drew. The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature (nonfiction, 2016)

130. Quinn, Spencer. Dog On It (fiction, 2009)

131. Quinn, Spencer. Thereby Hangs a Tail (fiction, 2010

132. Quinn, Spencer. To Fetch a Thief (fiction, 2010)

133. Goddard, Todd. Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life (nonfiction, 2025)

134. Walsh, Jenni L. Sonora (fiction, 2025)

135. Goldstein, Rebecca. Incompleteness : The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (nonfiction, 2005)

136. Collins, Chuck & Mary Wright. The Moral Measure of the Economy (nonfiction, 2007).

137. Steves, Rick. On the Hippie Trail: Instanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer (nonfiction, 2025) Note: He and his travel pal did not hitchhike at all and did not stay in youth hostels, so they might have been on the “hippie trail,” but they did not travel as “hippies.”

138. Grant, Stephen Starring. Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home (nonfiction, 2025).

139. Harrison, Robert Pogue. The Dominion of the Dead (nonfiction, 2003). 

140. Hudson, W.H., ed. & intro by Edward Garnett. Letters from W. H. Hudson, 1901-1922 (nonfiction, 1923)

141. Paul, Elliot. The Life and Death of a Spanish Town (nonfiction, 1937)

142. Wieseltier, Leon. Kaddish (nonfiction, 1998)

143. Stratton-Porter, Gene. At the Foot of the Rainbow (fiction, 1916)

144. Quinn, Spencer. The Dog Who Knew Too Much (fiction, 2011)

145. Karinthy, Frigyes. A Journey Round My Skull (nonfiction, 1939)

146. Cousineau, Phil. The Book of Roads (nonfiction, 2015)

147. Kehlmann, Daniel; trans. Ross Benjamin. The Director (fiction, 2023)

148. Joyce, James; ed. w/ notes by Seamus Deane. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (© 1964)

149. Casebeer, Karen. The Lure (fiction, 2025)

150. The Epic of Gilgamesh

151. Whyman, Paula. Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop (nonfiction, 2025)

152. Burke, James Lee. Another Kind of Eden (fiction, 2021)

153. Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger. 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (fiction, 2010)

154. Frank, Anne. Diary of a Young Girl (nonfiction; definitive edition)

155. Riordan, John J. The Dark Peninsula (nonfiction, 1976)

***

Wind makes wave lines in drifted snow.

New Year’s Resolution: Write More Letters!

 

Doing my part for USPS! Only one stamp left!
Time to purchase more.

Terrible, tragic news came from Denmark on December 30! The Danish postal service, 400 years old, is now kaput!  A hopeful note is sounded in the article you can read by following the link in the previous sentence, as well as the link within the link: “It seems like a slow-motion mistake; letter-writing is coming back into style, especially among young people sick of technology….” I should hope so! 

 

When I heard on NPR that Danes will no longer be able to mail letters, my heart almost froze, and I vowed then and there to write and send more letters in the coming year. I always have done—maybe not as often recently as in former years, but now I am doubly motivated, because I do not want to lose my beloved United States Postal Service! 

View from bank: Where is the bay?

On the morning of New Year’s Eve, Wednesday, a friend stuck his head in the door of Dog Ears Books to ask what on earth I was doing there, open on such a cold, blustery day. I told him I had to come to town, anyway, to collect my mail, always hopeful that I’ll find a friendly note in my p.o. box. He asked if my hopes had been rewarded, and I told him, yes, there was a holiday card from a friend, and the day before there had been two letters waiting for me. Hurrah!

 

View from inside bookstore

Also on December 30 I had a large family of customers who had decided to follow the Icelandic Christmas Eve tradition of exchanging books and then spending the evening reading them. Although late for Christmas Eve, they didn’t want to wait another year before getting started, so we had a wonderful time together on a cold, dreary winter day when I hadn’t expected to see a soul.

 

Still on the subject of mail and books, here's a reminder that, thanks to the foresight of Benjamin Franklin (and maybe a little self-interest on his part, too, since he was a printer by trade), the USPS offers a special rate for sending books, known generically now as media mail. It’s a wonderfully economical way to share books with family and friends. Please, however, do not include letters in your book package! Letters are first-class mail and need first-class postage, and I would not want to see book rate (the old name will always take precedence in my mind) vanish from mailing alternatives, having enjoyed it all my life. Magazines and newspapers cannot go at the media rate, either, as they contain advertising. Media mail is intended for educational purposes, a way of promoting national literacy.

 

Coincidentally, as one year passes into another, I find myself halfway through an epistolary novel set in 16^th-century Florence, Italy. Although the novel is written in French (and my French is rusty), it is easier to read than many modern French novels, perhaps because of the epistolary structure. My biggest challenge is keeping the many character/writers straight. Italian characters in a mystery novel written in French and set in the 16^th century = a quadruple challenge! Not that I ever figure out whodunit: I read mystery novels more for settings and characters.

 

On the car radio as I drove home one day in the last week of December, I heard part of a program where one person chooses a book to introduce to two other people, and I was immediately drawn by the discussion because the chosen book of the day was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It was interesting to hear how a trio of young people new to the book responded to a story I know practically by heart, how they interpreted the characters, and what themes they saw in the story.

Some people think Austen originally intended her second novel, P&P, to be composed entirely of letters, then changed her mind.

Re-reading her sister Jane's letters
strengthens Elizabeth's prejudice against Darcy.

As it is, there are nineteen letters in the book, all of them fairly long (with the exception of Mr. Bennett’s brief, wry response to a letter from a man his daughter Elizabeth had earlier refused to marry), and Mr. Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth is surely the longest, taking up almost the whole of Chapter 35. That letter, revealing as it does the character of the writer and of the other man Elizabeth had previously found more sympathetic, requires Lizzie to question her previous attitudes toward both. Arriving then back at her friend Charlotte’s house from her daily walk, she learns that she has missed a visit from Darcy’s cousin, but the cousin no longer holds any interest for Elizabeth, who can “think only of her letter,” that is, the letter from Mr. Darcy. Her head is filled with his words, and nothing else can hold her attention. Have you ever had that feeling?

 

(One member of my extended family detests epistolary novels. For me, they can be brilliant, or, perhaps more easily, trite and pedestrian, a lazy writer's shortcut, but certainly no one would accuse Austen of laziness. The quality of writing is separate from a story’s structure.)

 

When it comes to letters that arrive in my own post office box, all are welcome, and none is ever boring. Someone was thinking of me! If we lived only a few miles from one another, we could meet for coffee, go for a walk together, sit and “dream by the fire,” or play outdoors in the snow with my dog. When hundreds of miles separate us, each letter is a precious gift of the sender’s time given me. Priceless!

Envelopes not recycled yet

Nineteen Years Ago

What is written down and kept brings the past back to life.

I read a lot of books (over 150 in this year that is soon coming to an end), but now and again I look back and read my own words. For instance, on and off in my life I have carried around little dimestore notebooks filled with random jottings. This red-covered one from 2006 that surfaced recently begins with names of people met for the first time in my bookshop and in social settings. Nancy P., Michael H., Angela W. and Dennis S., Trudy C., all of them lasting friends, I first met that year. 

 

A few pages in, however, the jottings change character, because when the Artist and I traveled, I always kept notes, so I see that we left Leland on September 10^th that year, with the odometer reading 176,729. The day was sunny, clear, and cool, morning wet with heavy dew. East and north of Traverse City, it seemed to me that we entered a different world.

 

None of the elements is foreign to our own peninsula, but here they occur in unfamiliar configurations—not the hills, trees, fields we know but strange hills, strange pines, strange oaks, orchards, barns, subdivisions and business development.

 

That would be Antrim, Charlevoix, and Emmet counties going north. The September sunlight, I had written, was 

 

…soft and glaring at the same time, bringing every color forward—asters and goldenrod, the subtle lavender and plum and purple underlying green….

 

When we crossed the Mackinac Bridge, I spotted the firewood drop-off site and vowed to drop off “my worries and frets” at that point in our travels and leave them there. What was worrying me in 2006? Luckily, I don’t recall.

 

Crossing from the lower to the upper peninsula is always significant, but that September we were going farther, crossing into Canada at the Soo (Sault Ste. Marie). We stopped for gas on the U.S. side (12 gallons), and noticed a group of couples on motorcycles going in the same direction we were headed, searching for their passports to have them ready to hand, “so we won’t have to get off the bike,” as one of them put it.

 

In Ontario we stopped at the Visitors’ Centre to change money, then at a gas station to buy bottled water, and already I was “elated, giddy.” Everything was different! We were in a foreign country! I overheard a man at a pay phone speaking in a dialect of French so far from the French I had learned in school that I could hardly pick out a single word. Down the road at Bobber’s Restaurant (Bruce Mines, Ont.) was a trio of Germans conversing in their home language. A foreign country, a different Great Lake—not Michigan or Superior, our home lakes, but north Lake Huron, with pre-Cambrian shores and wild verges of tansy.

 

Next day: 

 

17-East is a road from heaven this morning. Traffic light. Fall color coming on. The bones of the Canadian Shield thrust up through a thin skin of soil. Old wooden fences surround pioneer fields, [and there are] small stone cairns on rock shoulders, glimpses of cool lakes and rivers, signs for trailer camping parks.

 

Sometimes all I write is a list of place names: Spruce Grove Cemetery, Iron Bridge (pop. 900), Iron Bridge Motel, Three Aces Restaurant, Elly’s Diner—“Mom & Pops,” I write. Then—“Mississagi River, big and beautiful, shining on its way.”

 

Finally, this list:

 

      patch of loosestrife

      iron bridge

      old board-and-wooden shingle house

 

with a note to self appended: “Picture these. Souvenez-les.” Remember them.

 

There were people congregated across the river at a rapids, many of them fishing, not many catching. Mississagi First Nation issues permits. And next came Blind River, pop. 3600. A float plane! Helicopter! Mixed yellows of tansy, butter-&-eggs, goldenrod, hawkweed, and coltsfoot.

 

Rocky points jut out, horizon filled with islands, sky with clouds, water with whitecaps and glints of reflected sunlight.

 

Next to the library (I remember the street and picture it today in my mind) was a real estate board listing 1000’ of shoreline, with 10 acres and year-round access, for $49,500. We were only in the market for lunch, though, and happy to find a Chinese restaurant and meet the proprietor, Ivy Chen, 16 years in Canada, over a year in Blind River, Ivy’s family including a husband and two children, 9-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl who sat with us while doing their homework. The soup was turkey broth with pork and pork wontons “and no MSG,” Mrs. Chen assured us. It was beautiful and delicious. I bought four books at the library for $1.25, and we were on our way again. Much later, when we were back in Leelanau County, I sent a couple books they had requested to the Chen children, who would be all grown up now. Looks like Blind River has grown, too, since we were there.

 

Serpent River … First Nation Trading Post … what I called “a sea of nothing but cattails in the sun, their seasons short-lived.” Above an outcropping, leaves were red and orange, “echoing the iron-stained color of the ancient rock surface.” Then I noted parenthetically, casting my mind back to the day before,

(Yesterday, somewhere, golden ferns and seedlings of red sumac on the ground looked as if the color had dripped down from the branches above.)

 

In Massy, Ontario (pop. 1,000), where we had stopped on a previous trip to photograph outdoor metal sculptures by Laval Bouchard, we decided to stay overnight at the Mohawk Motel, stopping while it was still afternoon. While the Artist rested from the drive, I sat outdoors with book and notebook, looking forward to exploring nearby Chutes Park and then, the next day, reaching Manitoulin Island, where I had arranged to rent a little cabin on a lake on the island for four nights. We decided we would come back to Massey on Saturday, after our time on Manitoulin, for a big street painting event. 

 

The Mohawk Motel was German-run and had a long list of written rules—quite a long list!—but the room was large and had “everything,” and the Artist loved it. Our cabin on Manitoulin would have no TV, so he was happy to have a movie channel for one night in Massey. Later we walked (1 kilometer) to Chutes Provincial Park and found our way through the campground to the waterfall before a light supper and well-earned sleep. Morning was coffee in our room, a dog walk, TV, then more coffee in the lobby, with toast, fresh muffin, and conversation with the owners, who were looking forward to the second year of their street painting festival. The wife had organized the event, and artists would be coming from Germany, the U.S., and other parts of Canada. Previous year’s attendance had been 10,000. Government funding had helped with a publicity campaign. I wonder if that festival is still going on…. 

 

And that is only a few pages in the beginning of a little notebook that goes on to recount our time on Manitoulin, the return visit to Massey for the festival, and finally a stretch of days in dear, familiar Grand Marais. It was one of our longer September getaways and one I love revisiting now, seeing those scenes once more as I flip the little pages.

 

Do you keep written notes on your travels? Sketchier or more fulsome than mine? Do your notes or diaries help you recall those earlier times?

Happy new year, if I don't write again until NEXT YEAR!

I don't have much to say.

Last night, the last night of this year’s Hanukkah; tomorrow night, Christmas Eve.

Lights! Light! The winter solstice behind us, we now have one or two minutes of additional daylight every day.

Cards and letters, greetings, gifts and gatherings. 

This is the good news—and while there is all too much of the other kind, this morning I am focusing on light and love and life and wishing the same for each of you this holiday season at another year’s end. We will never have this day again.

It's all in here: the sublime, silly, dangerous, petty, too cute for words, and a shed tear.

December 2, 2025

My banner photograph today is of the copper beech tree in Northport, brought from England long ago by a member of the Thomas family and still flourishing today. In which season is this venerable tree at its loveliest? I can’t decide but took the photograph above with my Samsung android phone one December morning, a little after 10 a.m., and to my eye it looked magnificent.

  

Ogden Nash

I don’t think it’s belittling his gift to call Ogden Nash a versifier. My discovery of Nash came in a volume called Parents Keep Out! on the shelves in my hometown library children’s room, and how could any kid resist a book with that name? What fun to memorize Nash’s poems, from two-liners to those of many stanzas! 

Here is probably the shortest verse Ogden Nash ever wrote. It’s called “Fleas,” and the entire poem is as follows:

Adam

Had ‘em.

Imagine my shock, however, to see that the site “All Poetry,” in analyzing the verse, refers to this clever couplet as a “witty quatrain”! Quatrain? A four-line stanza? Obviously not! Witty, yes. Quatrain, no.

Here is another two-line Nash poem, a favorite of my father’s and one of the earliest that I knew by heart without even trying:

God in his wisdom made the fly

And then forgot to tell us why.

One of my longer favorites was “Very Like a Whale,” which I leave you to look up for yourself by following this link—and then see if you can stop from reading more and more Ogden Nash verse. Fair warning: It is addictive.

Why do I drag in these humorous poems instead of some more ethereal ode to trees? Because Nash himself took off on Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” following Kilmer’s first two-line stanza with a second of his own:

 

Perhaps, unless the billboards fall

I’ll never see a tree at all.

 

Silly? Yes. Corny? Yes. But also irresistibly memorable, especially to a child discovering mockery of sacred literary cows for the first time.

 

Get Off of Your Cloud!

My son told me a couple years ago, “The cloud is just someone else’s bigger computer,” and with my initial skeptical aversion to cloud storage thus vindicated, I have continued to buy, read, and hold onto printed, bound books; to write letters and send them through the mail in stamped envelopes (treasuring written replies); and to store my digital files only on my own devices. (Note to self: Need a couple more flash drives, memory sticks, whatever they're called.) Here were my initial arguments against relying on the so-called cloud, i.e., “someone else’s computer,” somewhere else --

 

Ø How do I know the cloud won’t crash? 

Ø How do I know my data (i.e., my precious image and text files) will remain unchanged, uncorrupted, and accessible by me—and only by me?

Ø Finally, after reading about the massive amounts of water and power necessary to maintain those so-called clouds, and the dreadful 24/7 noise the data banks put out, why would I want to park in someone else’s backyard something I don’t want in my own? Better, I believe, to buy extra camera cards and additional flash drives and keep them in a safe place at home. 

If those arguments didn’t convince you, how about this one: Many people believe that massive data centers, currently touted for AI, are a bigger financial bubble than the country has ever yet seen. It all boils down to extractive industry and good old entropy. Most of the spending on the AI bubble, as is true of your beloved cloud storage, is not “virtual,” but very, very physical. Real estate. Buildings. Hardware. Electricity. Water. Now add to the deterioration of the surrounding physical environment and the rapid deterioration of electronic chips a super-scary degradation--the deterioration of information (“intelligence”?) gathered and synthesized as LLMs (Large Language Models) are put through post-training “learning.” 

Word of the day: sycophantic. Look it up. So-called artificial intelligence degrades rapidly the more it “learns” from what human beings say online. Garbage in, garbage out. Bullshit in, bullshit out. When put through post-training, AI becomes an obsequious flatterer rather than a knowledgeable advisor!

If you don’t understand how something is made, you should not invest in it. (Think cryptocurrency.) In the case of generative AI, the more you know about it, the less likely you are to invest. Seriously, watch and listen, because others are investing for you—your government, your money managers—and you cannot afford not to know what's going on. Has your community been asked to make room for a data center? Sooner or later, one will be proposed near you, so prepare yourself now with information.

Fonts and Politics???

Do you recognize the font I use on this blog? It's called Bookman Old Style, and I like both the name and the look, being a bookseller and always having been partial to serifs (particularly adnate serifs), those little extras that seem so graceful and generous. Do you see them as unnecessary furbelows? Consider:

Bookman Old Style example: AI

Helvetica example: AI

Which one is clearer to you? To my eye, the capital letter I without a serif looks like a small L or even the number 1. With a serif, there is no such confusion. And, as I say, I have always simply found serif fonts graceful and generous in appearance, overall more attractive, although many people see the matter differently and consider the sans serif fonts easier to read, cleaner, and more modern. 

One thing that would never have occurred to me would have been that a switch to a san serif font signaled some kind of political agenda, but leave it to Republicans to suspect liberalism's vile fingerprints on anything done by a Democratic administration, and so it isn't as unbelievable as it should be that Marco Rubio, current Secretary of State, has declared Anthony Blinken's switch to the simpler Calibri font a symptom of wokism and, somehow, “another wasteful DEIA program.” Good lord, it's almost enough to make me renounce serifs for life! But no, not quite. This insanity cannot last forever. For now, however, Rubio is reinstating the Times New Roman font “to restore decorum and professionalism” to the State Department. 

Ha! Wouldn't that be nice? To see “decorum and professionalism” again in our nation's capitol? (Why do I think that will take more than a change of typeface?) For now, who can tell me how eliminating serifs was more costly than restoring them will be? How petty can anyone be?

Just another red herring, folks. Another little brushfire to add to the giant smokescreen....

Turning Toward the Sun

No, not yet. It will be eleven more days before days begin to grow longer, and yet I'm sure I heard on the radio that yesterday was the year's earliest sunset and that tonight the sun will set marginally later. Can that be? Did I only imagine it? And will it matter, anyway, if clouds keep us covered? 

For me, though, every morning is a Sunny morning, come rain or come shine, and I know you want to see her, too, so here's the dog girl!

Her ears were blowing in the cold, cold wind!

Indoors, cozy and photogenic

We Lost a Most Memorable Northporter

It was a shock to learn on Monday evening that David Chrobak had died only that afternoon. My last relaxed visit with David (I'm not counting sidewalk chats outside the post office) was in his front yard one evening this past summer, and somewhere I have a photo taken from the yard, looking through hanging prisms and flowers to the Willowbrook Inn, but where can it be? Here, anyway, and much better, is a photo of David himself. The occasion was the 21st anniversary of my bookstore, which David on the cake he baked and decorated called “a love story.” David loved Northport, and Northport loved him back. There will never be another like him. David, we miss you already!

David Chrobak, Northport, MI, June 2014