Read What You Need

Note: I wrote this post over the course of a few days, so as to give mini-reports along the way to make my book-hopping lack of pattern more obvious. And then this morning I took long, leisurely outdoor time to walk with Sarah and photograph today’s beautiful Thursday world around me.

 

Tuesday afternoon

 

Already I have to resort to paraphrase, because I don’t know what I did with the original quote, but it came from another bookseller in another state, who said, as far as recommending or advising people on what books to read these days, that the thing to do right now is to read whatever it is you need. If you need information, read books of information. If it’s escape you need, read escape. I’d amplify that to say specifically that whether you need poetry or history or religious meditations or humorous essays, science fiction or Victorian gardening texts, whatever books you need are the ones you should be reaching for right now.

 

For me, once again, it’s sometimes one and sometimes another, and I go from one kind of reading to another, skipping between often totally unrelated books with no apology whatsoever. Crazy Horse, by Mari Sandoz, is both informative and beautifully written, as was Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson’s migrants did not find a perfect society in the North, but for the most part they were glad they had made the move, and I devoured that book to the last page quickly, eager to see how their lives turned out. It’s different with Crazy Horse. Since I know there will be no “happy ending” – and there are plenty of tragedies before the end, also – I keep setting that painful saga aside, taking breaks with something easier on the spirit.

Steve Hamilton’s A Cold Day in Paradise, the first of his Alex McKnight mysteries, was a re-reading experience, a little self-indulgence I frequently give myself in the best of times (which these are not). Even when I remember more of a story than I recalled from my first, long-ago reading of A Cold Day in Paradise (first memorably read in a motel in St. Ignace, cover to cover in one night), there is always a lot that I’ve forgotten and that seems fresh and new, whatever the book. 

 

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is a children’s book and generously (and beautifully) illustrated, so reading that story took me only very briefly away from the world of challenging reality and challenging reading. Native Tongue, the first volume of Susanne Haden Elgin’s feminist speculative fiction trilogy, interested me without completely fully absorbing my attention. I would call it a novel of ideas rather than a character- or plot-driven work. But it did offer escape from political campaigns and COVID-19 concerns.

Sometimes the way a book falls into my hands is complete serendipity. Such was the case with Jimmy Carter’s Why Not the Best? But I wrote about Why Not the Best? in my last post and won’t repeat myself here.

 

The Uncalled, by Paul Laurence Dunbar, published over a century ago, was something chosen more deliberately. Familiar with Dunbar’s name because of his poetry (Maya Angelou took her title I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from a Dunbar poems), I hadn’t realized he also wrote novels. Interestingly, though Dunbar was perhaps the first well-known black American poet, there is nothing of race in the story of The Uncalled – at least, so far. I’m only halfway through this little book.

 

 

And now already I’ve found something else that seems worth reading. My Brilliant Career, by Miles Franklin, made a big splash when its teen-aged author published her novel in Australia in 1901, but then it was out of print until 1966. Despite the book’s initial success, Franklin felt there was no place for her in the new, very male, nationalistic Australian literary world; she was also unhappy with some of the interpretations laid upon her work.

 

Australia – now that’s an escape from my everyday world!

Our brave little reading circle, the one that convened years ago to study James Joyce’s Ulysses together, is now committed to reading and discussing for November William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner will be a stretch for me, as I am in general not a fan, but the book covers the same period as Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, so it will be interesting from that standpoint, and I need to challenge myself, anyway, which was this group’s original mission – to read together books we might not have read on our own. 

 

Some (but not all) of us took on Proust one fall, and I’ve been reading him again recently, in French, a few pages at a time. I’m not sure whether to classify Proust “difficult” or a familiar and comforting refuge. He is probably the latter for me. Not an “easy” read, but his writing is luxurious – especially the opening scenes of childhood, both at the grandparents’ house in Combray and in the parks and streets of Paris. These long-ago, faraway scenes carry me away from the present, away from worry and strife -- and isn’t that how we define escape reading?

 

Wednesday morning

 

I finished The Uncalled last night and fell asleep over early pages of My Brilliant Career. Of the former, I can say it is very much a Victorian novel, with only a couple of places that one might, if informed of the author’s life, see something of his own experience as a black man in [that long-ago] turn-of-the-century America. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s parents, I read, were born in slavery, so he and his siblings were the first generation of the family born free, but as the orphan protagonist of The Uncalled, however, realizes so strongly, there is more to freedom than not being held in bondage. The fictional character longs to break away from his guardian’s very strict religious household (where baseball is considered as great a sin as dancing) and her plans to make him a preacher. Like Dunbar himself, young Brent longs for the freedom of the writing life. When a friend in the seminary warns him of that life’s agonies, Frederick Brent listens with no change of heart.

 

“This is your story,” said Brent; “but men differ and conditions differ. I will accept all the misery, all the pain and defeat you have suffered, to be free to choose my own course.”

 

Besides several volumes of poetry, for which he is chiefly known, Dunbar’s only other published book was Tales from Dixie, a collection of short stories featuring African-Americans before and after emancipation. This may be his least sentimental, most realistic work, and I would like to read it sometime. Sadly, the writer died young, only 33 years old, but he earned success while he lived, which is more than many poets, black or white, can say.

 

Not having more Dunbar on hand last night, I curled up in bed with My Brilliant Career but laid it aside to watch “Dark Waters” with the Artist, taking it up again after the movie and falling asleep before getting very far into the story. And earlier this morning, over the first cup of coffee, somehow I became embroiled in old e-mails, clearing out as many as could be deleted, filing others, re-reading and re-living days COVID and pre-COVID.

 

Here at the bookstore now, I’m pleased to have restocked many of Jim Harrison’s fiction titles; Katey Schultz’s brilliant Still Come Home (which every American should read); and to have some charming new children’s books now in stock. October will be the last full month of the 2020 year for Dog Ears Books (let’s be clear: we do plan to be back in the spring!), but it isn’t too early to get some of that holiday shopping out of the way, and I’ll be glad to help with that. 

 

 

Wednesday afternoon

 

Continuing with My Brilliant Career, I am intrigued by the fact that the adolescent author, while complaining of her own fate when times grew hard for the family, managed to recognize her parents’ difficulties, as well, and even to see their life in the greater national context.

 

…Household drudgery, woodcutting, milking, and gardening soon roughen the hands and dim the outside polish. When the body is wearied with much toil the desire to cultivate the mind, or the cultivation it has already received, is gradually wiped out. Thus it was with my parents. They had dropped from swelldom to peasantism. They were among and of the peasantry. None of their former acquaintances came within their circle now, for the iron ungodly hand of class distinction has settled surely down upon Australian society – Australia’s democracy is only a tradition of the past. 

 

I wonder, is My Brilliant Career considered an Australian classic by now – does it still fall short of the Australian male nationalist literary tradition?

 

Thursday morning

The world forced itself upon me last night. The event was the vice-presidential “debate,” and I steeled myself to listen, confident that it could not sink to the level of the presidential candidates’ horror show circus. Fortunately, I am blessed with generally low blood pressure.

 

Everyone listening (or watching, as more probably did) will have a different impression of the performances. My impression of Pence – a cipher in my mind beforehand – was that he is a very slippery, sneaky little man. He pretended great politeness and respect at the beginning of each two minutes allotted him (“Thank you, Susan”) but then talked on past his limit again and again, while the moderator tried to stop him with “Thank you, Mr. Vice-President” over and over. He also interrupted Senator Harris more than once. In short, he was as determined as the president not to be hemmed in by the rules but maintained a surface demeanor of civility and normality.

 

How many questions asked by the moderator were actually answered by either candidate? Once Pence asked that the record show that Harris had not answered a question – this after he, Pence, had evaded countless previous questions! I wish Harris had challenged him on that hypocritical remark, as well as on his repeated admonition to her, “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” This was a fiendish ploy, as the very phrase “alternative facts” was invented in the White House to excuse lies told by the president! The vice-president took the administration’s own guilt and painted the senator with it, and Harris let him get away with it!

 

I still have no clear answer on the Democratic position on fracking. I believe fracking should be banned, for strong scientific reasons, but now it seems both parties have decided that fracking is something holy -- if anything, more sacred than a fertilized human egg. Will people be talking about fracking today? Will that issue get any attention at all? For me, it was the most worrisome take-away, other than the revelation of the vice-president’s character.

And so this morning, waking once again to the political take-over of my brain, I fled to Australia with Miles Franklin, and during the day I will no doubt read a few more poems by Jane Kenyon (because Lord knows I need poetry right now and will probably need it more and more in the less than four weeks ahead!), but before the bookstore I spent time in the beautiful outdoors with my dear old dog.

 

I am not, you see, doing a complete ostrich act and avoiding reality or succumbing to an escape addiction, but neither am I willing to let every waking moment be taken over by those aspects of reality that do nothing but heighten anxiety and/or plunge me into depression. I'm no good to anyone like that. Regular reading of other times and places is part of my life, anyway. The difference now is that I do it for sanity’s sake. 

Measured doses – reality, escape – I seek some kind of mental balance. A beautiful, sunny fall morning doesn’t hurt, either.

 

Donde la tierra es roja

Agriculture in Graham County, AZ

He looked out at the red earth stretching around them. It was hard to imagine, but millions of years ago this had been the bottom of a massive inland sea. Aquatic dinosaur bones had been dug up under this soil and there were still places in the desert where mounds of fossilized seashells baked under the sun. 

- Jane Harper, The Lost Man 

Harper’s story takes place in the Australian outback, an environment even drier and more severe than Arizona. The red earth passages, though, set me to musing, first on similarities between Australia and Arizona, and then to other red earth parts of the world. Here in southeast Arizona, our pinkish-grey mountains can turn red at sunset, and there are places in Cochise and Graham County where the soil is red enough to remind me of Georgia clay. Here’s a passage from a children’s novel set in Georgia:

Then it began to rain. It rained and it rained and it rained. The yard ran in gullies, the lane was pink and slippery, and the road was deep in red mud. 

“I’m a-going to lose my mind,” Ma said, “if you all don’t stop a-tracking that old red clay into my house.” 

- Virginia H. Ormsby, Long Lonesome Train Whistle

That reminds me also (as my train of associations rolls along) that the first time I traveled in the American South, camping with my parents and sisters on our way to visit grandparents who had moved in retirement to the Gulf Coast of Florida, the red Georgia soil seemed bizarre and alien to my Midwestern eyes, whereas now, in more recent years, whether traveling through the South or spending time in Southwest, I have repeatedly been struck by the similarity of red earth in the southern U.S. to that where my “pen pal,” Kathy, lives in New South Wales, Australia, and — between here and there, if you take the Atlantic route — the red earth of South Africa, Botswana, and other countries in Africa, places I only know by reading about them. 

I asked Kathy (she’s the one who sent me the book quoted at the beginning of this post), for permission to use one of her photographs, and she not only said yes (thanks, Kathy Dowling!) but also sent another image, one I hadn’t seen before and had a little trouble deciphering at first. The first photo you won’t have a problem interpreting, but the second image below is a photograph taken during a dust storm that had engulfed my friends’ country home and B&B. This is not an altered image: the dust is this thick, bright red. Can you believe it?

Red earth around dam (pond) in New South Wales

Red dust storm, New South Wales

And now an old friend from my earliest Michigan life, married to a Brazilian, has sent me photos from their South American life — and there it is again: red earth. Jeanie Furlan writes, “The color of the earth is sandy red … in Pereira Barreto.…  Closer to São Paulo, the Ribeirão Preto earth is a deep, rusty red, and it is much more fertile.”  

Red earth in Brazil

Besides photos of the red earth, she sent an example of local architecture, saying, “This is the Aunt and Uncle’s house where I first visited in 1973  (outside Sales Oliveira). They use flooring that will match the earth and outside wall color is also the same as the earth.  It makes sense since people will track this color from boots and rain, dust and wind will blow this color around.”

Utilization of earth tones, Brazil

Of course, dwellers in the American Southwest have long used the colors of local earth in houses, walls, tiles, and decorative items. And here are a couple more red-earth images from here in Arizona, down near Pearce:

We know now that the continents of earth were not always configured as they are today, but I was in school too early to have been taught about plate tectonics, so lately I’ve been doing some catching up, marveling that the idea of continents moving at all is so recent in scientific history. In The Fossil Book: A Record of Prehistoric Life, by Carrol Lane Fenton & Mildred Adams Fenton, I turn (after lingering on the familiar Devonian examples) from compelling illustrations of fossils in rocks to passages of text that dwell on the movements of continents. There I learn that when Alfred Wegener and Alexander du Toit seriously proposed the idea in 1912, neither they nor anyone else could explain how the continents might have moved. The theory of seafloor spreading didn’t come along until H. H. Hess of Princeton put it together and published in 1962. So when I was in my high school freshman earth science class, plate tectonics theory was brand-new, a subject of scientific debate, and not the accepted working model and received knowledge it has since become. Pangea, Laurentia, Gondwana — prehistoric continents — an entirely different configuration of earth’s land and water. Fascinating!

I read novels set in other parts of the United States and the world, dwell on images sent by friends, recall soils in places I have visited, and I imagine (mind you, this is only my imagination at work!) all the red earth territories originally conjoined, and when I’m actually in red earth country, staring at the bright ground and rocks, I feel closer to other red earth parts of the world, as well as to characters in books who live in such places, as if we are still connected somehow by being on similar ground. Then I wonder this: around the world, how many different languages are spoken in red earth lands, and how many different words do human beings use to describe those places?

The “world” is at once so large and, as “earth,” a home small and contained and intimate. Or so it often seems to me.

Unpredictable Flow of Random Thoughts

What accounts for the randomness of thought sequences? Here’s just a snippet of mine this morning:

Small town residents all over America practice a lot of Cargo Cult thinking: If we could just lure enough people here from outside, our problems would be solved! If we build it, surely they will come! Our prayers will be answered!

Every solution to an old problem creates brand-new problems, usually unanticipated or minimized.

Ernest Hemingway would never have made it as a murder mystery writer. Not enough adjectives. Agree or disagree?

If Marguerite Henry were still alive, she would be writing a book about the Australian wonder horse, Black Caviar. How many Americans have even heard the name? And yet this filly won every race she ever won, all 22, including the Royal Ascot in England.

Not only do we hear little Australian news in this country, we hardly know what’s going on in Canada, with whom we share a border from sea to shining sea. What’s up with that? I love Canada! I want more Canadian news!

Please remember that Aaron Stander will be at Dog Ears Books this coming Saturday from noon to 2 p.m. I’ve read all six of his Sheriff Ray Elkins mystery and agree with Elizabeth Buzzelli that this latest one is the best yet.

But before that, it’s Thanksgiving in only three days, and that’s where all our minds are focused. So many blessings, even in the midst of anxieties and concerns. Family, friends, books, dogs, woods, fields, and lakeshore. Love and friendship. Intellectual stimulation and pleasures of the senses. Opportunities to help and give comfort to others. Knowing and remembering that giving as well as receiving is a gift. Soup to nuts. The whole nine yards. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Scenes and News From Down Under

Road to Varykino

Isn’t this a most inviting road, and wouldn’t you love to put yourself on it? Would you walk or drive? Maybe horseback would be best. Yes, I think so.

For quite a while I carried on correspondence with two friends I’d never met, and then in April Helen and I spent a week together in Arizona, two booksellers on winter vacation, and had a delightful time. I’ve been corresponding with Kathy for a year and a half, and we have yet to meet, but she lives on the other side of the world, literally. She and her husband, Grahame, make their home in New South Wales, Australia, and the photo on top of this post shows the road to their country B&B, Varykino. Kathy and I share love of animals, of books, of movies, and so we always have much to share in our e-mail letters to one another. Sometimes we put thoughts on paper or send each other physical books in the mail. I love the Australian stamps but feel guilty when a package arrives from Kathy, because it costs so much to send anything to the U.S. from Australia.

Here’s some of what’s happening in the Land of Oz these days: It’s late autumn, with winter just around the corner, and Kathy and Grahame lit their first fire in the fireplace last night. (Well, “last night” it was when she wrote to tell me the news: the time difference is something enormous.) In Tasmania (“a tiny place compared to the rest of Australia,” Kathy notes), the factory farming of chickens has been outlawed. Kathy finished reading Anne Tyler’s new book, The Beginner’s Goodbye, and is now enjoying The Descendants, by Kaui Hart Hemmings. And last but not least, that amazing and undefeated filly Black Caviar won her 21^st race and will now go to Ascot. I am already dreaming of I’ll Have Another winning the Belmont, Black Caviar winning at Ascot, and the two of them meeting for one great, world-shaking race.

Until then, here are a couple of quieter horses, escaping fame in the New South Wales bush country. Looks like a pretty good life to me. As for a meeting with Kathy, the two of us are thinking that Paris, France, would be a nice rendez-vous destination, but if you're going to Australia what could be prettier than the bush country of New South Wales? There are wineries in the vicinity of Varykino, too--kind of a Leelanau Down Under?

Along Grahame's morning walk

Life in the Slow Lane and Books in Person

There's a lovely little trade periodical I've subscribed to now for about a year called Book Source Magazine. Published by a bookseller in Cazenovia, New York, with additional contributions from England and Australia, BSM is a periodical Charles Lamb could have appreciated. How quirky is it to publish a small print magazine about books these days? I love it! John Huckans also writes about gardening in his Notes and Comment section at the beginning of each issue. He’s going to try ranunculus this year, and I’m campaigning to sell him on hellebores.

But getting back to books, the May-June issue has an article by a bookseller in Melbourne, Australia, the proprietor of Alice's Bookshop in North Carlton, and this man, Anthony Marshall, has put so many of my own feelings into words that I'm half in love with him. For starters, he has pulled all his Internet listings offline and is "no longer an internet bookseller. It's over, finished, done with. And I am delighted." He cites the diminishing returns of income for time involved (my chief reason for pulling out of my own online listing service) and the tedium of processing online orders and inquiries, “cataloguing and tracking down and packing books...: the paper-work and the e-mail work, the answering of stupid or vexatious or footling questions from prospective customers." Yes, yes, yes! He goes on:

And who wants to come into a bookshop where the bookseller is hunched like a hobbit before a flickering monitor, absorbed in his freakish fantasy virtual world when he should be at his desk ready to welcome you, if not with open arms, at least with a smile or a nod of the head and perhaps a word of greeting?

Mr. Marshall describes what he calls in general a "slow bookshop" as one in which "books are stocked not primarily for their ranking in the best-seller list but for their intrinsic and lasting worth." He notes that the bookseller in a slow bookshop may sometimes be seen reading a book or writing a letter by hand, adding, "Not everyone has given up on pen and ink." Do I need to mention that he has no interest in e-books? Here is a bookseller on the other side of the world, in the other half of the seasonal year, who feels as I do about my professional life! While reading, I underlined so many sentences and paragraphs in the article that I finally had to sit down to write, in longhand, a letter to the magazine's publisher, because I too:

...know intuitively that there are legions of people still in the world ... who are committed to the slow search, who are not in a hurry, who relish browsing in real bookshops: people who do not want the quick fix always and the shortest path, or the lowest price, but are prepared to meander down by-ways and the side-tracks: to be seduced by the delights and dangers of serendipity. To wait and see.

A few years back, I happened to mention to a casual acquaintance that I longed for my own little Cajun accordion. “Look on Ebay,” the person suggested, a trifle impatient with what he saw as my thwarted desire. That wasn't it at all. I didn’t feel thwarted and wasn’t concerned with immediate gratification. “No, I want to enjoy wanting it for a while,” I tried to explain. Slow bookshop people understand the pleasures of wanting and searching, as well as the “delights of dangers of serendipity.” It isn't only about finding what they want but also about wanting what they find.

And don't you just love the way Anthony Marshall writes? "Hunched like a hobbit"! "The delights and dangers of serendipity"! Isn't this great stuff? And the attitudes he expresses, e.g., that "there is more to life than efficiency and other economic imperatives." Hear, hear!

I feel he is talking about me and Dog Ears Books, as well as about himself and Alice's Bookshop when he writes, "In my slow bookshop, I face my customers and engage with the world, with life." Aye, that we do, so prepare to slow down when you visit Dog Ears Books. It’s that kind of dangerous place!


Book Source Magazine is published bimonthly. The basic subscription rate is $20; library rate $24; Canada and Mexico $24; $40 overseas airmail. Subscription requests and other correspondence should be directed to Book Source Magazine, P.O. Box 567, Cazenovia, NY 13035. The publisher can also be contacted by telephone or e-mail, (315) 655-8499 or bsm at windstream dot com.