“Locals’ Summer” Is Underway

Friends of the heart

Labor Day is past, but for locals who work all summer, it has only just arrived, and I started the season with Sunday and Monday (September 8 & 9) spent mostly outdoors, under alternate cloudy skies and sunshine, when Sunny and I hosted our hiking buddies from Arizona, who now live in southeastern Michigan. The four of us picked up right where we left off with our last visit. 

Auntie Therese is Sunny Juliet’s second mom and young husky Yogi SJ’s best friend. Wrestling in the yard, chasing tossed balls, walking on the beach, wading in Lake Michigan, or just lying down near each other, Sunny and Yogi reunited were in seventh heaven. We left them alone in the house for a couple of hours (first time ever!) and returned to find everything exactly as we’d left it. Happy dogs, happy dog moms!

Lunch without dogs, can you believe it?

Then Tuesday it was back to work for me, refreshed and relaxed, bookstore door open to balmy September air. The giant book purchase and move, all seven or so trips with car loaded down with heavy boxes, was finished before our friends’ visit, so I was able to start my slower season without the sword of Damocles hanging over my head.

 

Of course, besides integrating as many as possible of the “new” additions into my preexisting collection, I squirrel away a book here and there for home reading this fall and winter, awaiting a future time when shelf space opens up on Waukazoo Street. One book I took home expecting something very different was an exciting surprise. The cover didn’t look like much, the dust jacket was missing, and the title didn’t tell me anything at all, but a little voice whispered in my ear, and home with me it went. 

Faint pine cone only clue....

How wonderful! Driftwood Valley, far from being the Western novel its title and brown cloth-covered boards seemed to indicate, turned out to be – well, a reissue of the book in 1999 by Oregon State University Press clearly informed potential readers what to expect with a subtitle: A Woman Naturalist in the Northern Wilderness. 

 

The author, Theodora C. Stanwell-Fletcher, and her husband, Jack, entered the wilds of northern British Columbia in 1937 and lived for a year and a half on an otherwise uninhabited lake (after building a log cabin) hundreds of miles from towns and roads, in country noted on maps only as “unexplored” and “unsurveyed.” Their nearest neighbors were Indian trappers; their work was “collecting” (she generally wrote of “collecting” and avoided calling “killing” by that name) animals to ship skins and skulls to an American museum. They returned in 1941 for another couple of seasons before world war intervened.

 

Prior to their marriage, Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher had accompanied her naturalist father on many of his travels and earned her doctorate in animal ecology from Cornell in 1936, while her husband, John Stanwell-Fletcher, had experience in the Arctic. Their modes of travel including snowshoes, canoe, pack horses, and pack dogs, Teddy and Jack traveled and hiked by themselves at times, other times with Indian guides. They camped outdoors in temperatures as low as 40 degrees below zero, when managing to make a fire meant the difference between life and death, as did succeeding in killing a few grouse – better yet, a moose -- for meat to sustain them on the trail. Following the text at the end of the book are lengthy lists of plants and animals the Stanwell-Fletchers collected in the wilds of British Columbia. The lists alone, with genus and species names, is impressive. Four varieties of horsetail alone!

Only the first page of the lists --

 

Driftwood Valley, I learn online, was Wendell Berry’s favorite book during a period of his boyhood in Kentucky, and it's no wonder. Wilderness adventure! I reached the final page on Tuesday morning before breakfast with my company and a long walk with our dogs, drinking in the beauty of Michigan at the same time as we reminisced about our hikes with these same dogs in the mountains of southeastern Arizona. My Michigan country life is tame and domestic compared to northern British Columbia in the 1930s and ’40s or even Cochise County ghost town winters, but I am happy to live where I live. It's a very good place!

Happy dogs off-leash in the yard.

Tomatoes seen behind non blooming (so far) morning glory vine

Tomatoes are ripening at last in my garden, and jalapeno peppers have formed nicely. Okra was a total bust, even though started early from seed, and my friend said hers in southeast Michigan didn’t do anything, either, though she’d had success in warmer Arizona summers, but Japanese anemones have bloomed at last (they need a tomato cage support to keep from falling over) ...

 

... and the brilliance of velvety scarlet snapdragons rewards my decision to introduce a few annuals in pots among the perennials. Only one chrysanthemum blossom so far, and that’s fine, because ’mums need to wait their turn, and it is not their turn yet. Plaintively, however, I cry out, “Where are my purple coneflowers?” Little grey-headed coneflowers in the meadow have been prolific again this year, and asters are coming along nicely, but not a sign of the purple coneflowers do I see. 

 

Wednesday:

 

I began writing this post on Tuesday before remembering the evening’s scheduled presidential debate. I had no intention of watching (no TV) or streaming (my watching would not affect the outcome), and I didn’t even want to get into the frequent Facebook checking with friends who would be watching and commenting, because Wednesday morning, I assured myself, would be soon enough to hear what happened. Meanwhile, having wrapped up the story of the Stanwell-Fletchers in British Columbia, I chose for Tuesday evening’s bedtime escape reading a John Dunning murder mystery, Booked to Die, something I read long enough ago that I didn’t remember anything about the plot, only that the used and rare book business played a prominent part in the story.  

 

Denver homicide detective Cliff Janeway, a compulsive book collector outside of work hours, finds in the murder of a book scout all the earmarks of the same murderer who has eluded him multiple times. By the middle of the book, Janeway has gone beyond the law to punish the murderer, turned in his badge, and is preparing to open his own shop on Denver’s Book Row.

 

…Bobby [the book scout] had come to Madison Street alone. … He had insisted on loading the books himself, which was fine with the two heirs, who had no intention of helping, anyway. Bobby had brought hundreds of cardboard boxes and had spent all night packing and loading the books. … [He] loaded the last of the books as dawn broke in the east.

        - John Dunning, Booked to Die 

 

The paragraph quoted speaks not of the romance of rare books but of the physical reality of a big book “deal,” the one where you get a good price because, rather than being able to cherry-pick a collection, you agree to take everything. This is the part of a bookseller’s life that does not involve “thinking outside the box” but thinking constantly, obsessively, about boxes: Too small, and they won’t hold enough books; too large, and they’re too heavy to lift. They need to be sturdy. Cartons from the grocery store that held jugs of water or bottles of wine are a good size and appropriately sturdy, but storage boxes for legal files have handholds and lids so are more readily stackable. 

Object of bookseller obsession

.

Too many when you don't need them, too few when you do.

Yes, it’s mundane, but the mundane is often a crucial consideration in any endeavor, and it cuts a lot of ice in bookselling. As a colleague likes to say, “You only get one back.” A good sturdy handcart with tires that won’t go flat is also worth its weight in gold. So it is that the concerns of Janeway’s murdered book scout resonate with my experience, as does advice Janeway’s new colleagues give him. 

 

People often say, “advice is cheap,” because people give it for free usually when you don’t ask for it. Over the years, I’ve learned to smile when people who have never owned or managed a bookstore or any other kind of business tell me what I “should” be doing. Once, though – and I’ve never forgotten it – a seasoned bookseller turned around in my doorway as he was leaving and said, “A word of advice --.” I smiled, and he said, “Good shoes.” That’s all he said. Years later he reappeared in Northport and said, “You probably don’t remember me.” I said, “Yes, I do. ‘Good shoes’! It was the best advice anyone’s ever given me!” Good shoes and a well-cushioned mat behind my desk are my recipe for extending the health of my feet and back, and the shoes also go well with dog walks and agility practice. 

 

Back to Tuesday --. As I say, I figured my watching or not watching the debate wouldn’t change the outcome and that I’d hear all about it the next day. Then Wednesday morning I woke to realize that it was once again 9/11, that infamous date on which our country was attacked. No rush, then, I thought, to post to my blog. What with the debate the night before and the sad anniversary come around again, who could possibly care about the life of one little small-town bookseller, even if she also has a dog whose online face makes strangers smile?

Sunny says, "I'm the cute one."

So now it’s Thursday, and here’s my post for the week, with bits from my reading, my business, and my life with friends and dog, here on a little northern Michigan peninsula, now all-too-thoroughly discovered but still quite beautiful and with protected public shoreline for us all to share. We are so lucky!

 

Out With the Old, In With the New

"Table!" is an agility command that translated well to this forest stump.

Since winter arrived (or this season's version of winter, anyway, which hasn't been all that wintry in terms of snow), Sunny and I go out a couple times a day for half an hour to an hour on what I call a walk -- she does a lot of running, which I’m happy to leave to her -- and New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day were no exceptions. Before I get into those days, though, I want to back up in time. If you read my 12/28/23 post, you already know that Sunny was invited with me to the home of friends for Christmas Day dinner and that she behaved very well (i.e., amazingly well, which is to say, she amazed me!). My reason for turning back so far in the 2023 calendar is not to repeat myself, but to focus on one of the ornaments on our friends’ holiday tree. You might not see it if you didn’t look closely. 

So much to notice on one tree!

But here is the dragon.

There, you see? I don’t recall the artist’s name who made this ornament (Marjorie would have to remind me), but isn’t it perfect for my first post of the new year, the Year of the Wood Dragon? (I would have put it at the very beginning, except that Sunny thought she deserved top billing.)

 

A day or two later, I had another invitation that included Sunny, and while I wouldn’t have time to get her out for a lot of hard exercise before we went to the home of these friends, our hostess promised a walk on the beach – and, as I say, a “walk” off-leash for Sunny means she gets to run -- and run she did! She had a glorious romp, and sunset was glorious, too! Dinner conversation was so lively that Sunny didn’t start barking until she noticed her reflection in the windows. 

Barbara leads the way.

Happy girl!

Glorious sunset --

So not only did I have an unusually social week, but so did my dog, and that made me happy! 

Without any big plans for ushering in the new year, I asked friends if I could bring them cheesecake on New Year’s Day afternoon, and they graciously agreed. Then, out of the blue, I had an invitation to a New Year’s Eve party that was scheduled to run from 7:30 to after midnight, hosted by old friends I hadn’t spent time with for quite a while, so while I have never been much of a “party animal,” I resolved to attend and enjoy myself. 

 

Driving the back roads of the township after dark, I was visited by ghosts of years past, remembering Basil S. back when he still did car repair at his place; Louis R., an old Barb’s Bakery regular; Ellen B., who drove her big car much longer than she should have been driving. Driving out of my way at one point and, turning around, seeing cattails in my headlights, I thought of Ellen going off the road and into the swamp, where she stayed overnight until someone discovered her. (That must have been before cell phones.) I remembered the parents of my host of the present evening, too, and sitting next to his mother at a New Year’s Eve dinner years ago….

Old trees make way for the young.

Now we – my host and hostess, her brother and sister-in-law, and I – are the old folks. There was a moment in the evening when the younger people fell silent while we oldtimers belted out Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” but otherwise we were the quiet generation, and that was fine. I looked around the living room at everyone gathered there and felt a surge of tenderness for all, tinged with a bit of melancholy, of course (because in years past, the Artist and I attended this NYE party together), but I was happy to be there, even at that.

 

I’d spent most of the day on Sunday making a big pot of hoppin’ john and a pot of rice to go with it so on Monday afternoon took a couple containers up to my neighbors, as well as, later, a container of each with the cheesecake to my Northport friends. Another good visit, comparing notes on one another’s lives past and present and our hopes (mine very modest) for the year to come.

 

(Two nights coming home in the dark! Really, I guess, it was all the same day, first at 12:30 a.m. and then around 6 p.m.)

 

I finished out my 2023 reading year with two books of fiction, both first novels by authors I hope to see more from in future: from Detroit, Shifting Through Neutral, by Bridgett M. Davis, and from Idaho, Winter Range (a novel set in rural Montana), by Claire Davis.

 

On the last day of the year, I began what will be the first title on my Books Read 2024 list, a memoir by Susan Straight entitled The Country of Women, and I cannot say enough about this author. I did say a bit back on November 2, but since then I have read another of her novels (Mecca, her most recent) and have been devouring her memoir, a long love letter addressed to her three daughters, telling them everything she knows about previous generations on both sides of their family.

Now, with Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel, The Waters, coming out in only days, something that strikes me, despite their different worlds, is how much Campbell and Straight have in common. Both of them are content to live in what “sophisticated” people on the East and West Coasts (or even in the higher echelons of academia in any part of the country) would probably see as poor, backwater communities. Straight was asked in one of her writing classes why she kept turning in stories about working-class people, and Campbell’s fiction has been labeled “rural noir” or “grit lit.” I just shake my head. These women are both brilliant writers, and they make, of their overlooked neighborhoods and neighbors, fiction that rings true and important for the same reasons that any fiction rings true and important: the characters are people whose lives are fraught with challenge, who are sometimes (not always) noble even in failure, families that are, as much as any other, Americans, all of them together making up not a melting pot but a rich, many-flavored stew -- vivid characters who come alive on the pages and live in our minds and hearts after we close the books. I should probably add that Straight and Campbell’s works are also noteworthy for portrayals of strong women. So whatever your gender or orientation, if you are weary of the women in Henry James or Ernest Hemingway, or if you simply want literature that includes more layers of complex and diverse humanity, make 2024 the year that you discover Bonnie Jo Campbell and Susan Straight. 

 

Make it also, please, a year of enchantment, if you can. Pick up a pencil or paintbrush or a flute or guitar, go for a walk in the woods or on the beach or just around the block, and leave the to-do lists in a desk drawer. Get lost, if only in a dream. Explore, if only with a paper map. 

We won’t always be here. Don’t overlook the wonderful in ordinary life. Today we are alive, and that is beautiful.

Home, Sweet Home

Postscript: 

 

I’ve gone back mentally over my holidays and decided they definitely deserve a higher rating than I’d been giving them. When people asked, I was saying, “Not bad.” Well, the time was much better than “not bad.” 

 

From the people I fed to the people who fed me, from the bookstore customer who brought his tools to put one of my bookcases back into working order to friends who invited my dog to their homes, from quiet hours cooking in my “Paris kitchen” to outdoor rambles in the countryside that has seen so little snow that I haven’t had to have my driveway plowed a single time yet. Messages of holiday greetings to and from distant loved ones. People who found their way from faraway to Dog Ears Books. My own reading at home. Those peaceful, dark country roads with occasional outdoor holiday lights on homes passed. The dog park and the beach. My little Charlie Brown tree on Waukazoo Street and my much tinier tree at home. And so much more!

 

My holidays were good. As for this new year just begun, it’s a wonderful life, and I don’t want to waste it, so my friends, let us be light to one another.

"When it's cold outside / I got the month of May...."

Post-postscript:

Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell here.
Interview with Susan Straight here. 

Many more to be found online -- just search for the authors by name.

We Turned the Corner, Walking

The north wind blew for a couple of days, and Leelanau residents and visitors closed their windows against the chill night air. When the wind shifted around and came back from the south, it wasn’t any longer a summer breeze but pleasantly balmy again, as September winds and breezes can be (even with rainclouds above), and so the windows were opened again. Now along county roadsides, pinkish lavender of spotted knapweed and cornflower blue of chicory share the stage with the whites of Queen Anne’s lace umbels and white sweet clover racemes, and there are peaches and nectarines in the markets and on roadside stands.

 

Is September an exciting beginning to a new year for you, or does it signal a bittersweet, melancholy season? Opinions are divided, but I’m wondering if it can’t be both. So few things in life are cut and dried, black or white, don’t you find? The very idea of bittersweetness captures the absence of a clear-cut distinction, and I’m all for the William James’s non-static view of life: 

 

It is, the reader will see, the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention. (Principles of Psychology, 254) 

 

We don’t pass from one “state of mind” block to the next, with a sharp dividing line between them. Thoughts and feelings can be hazy, fringed at the horizon, spreading into one another. Certainly that sounds like the bittersweet feeling Susan Cain describes in her book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, about which I wrote a bit last winter.

September 2000 took us to Paris, France.

Whether you find September exciting or melancholy or maybe a bit of both or something else altogether (What else? Pray share!), summer’s end is a good time for poetry. Not that there is a bad time, but September’s apple-scented air seems to call for poetry in a special way, and I’ve been reading High Water Mark: Prose Poems, by David Shumate, rationing the pages so as not to run through the slim volume too fast – and then Fleda Brown’s Flying Through a Hole in the Storm, with its marvelous poem, “Milkweed,” in which these lines appear: 

 

            The stalks remain upright

in spite of their hollowness. Everything is hollow

      in a good way. Everything has finished its job

            and has moved on to the next thing.

 

Brown writes of milkweed’s “bliss of shedding.” Can we learn to do that? To shed blissfully? I need to think about whether or not I want to shed and if so, what....

 

After reaching the end of a very unsatisfying murder mystery on Saturday, I was ready for a dose of good nonfiction and turned to Rebecca Solnit, who never disappoints me. Her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking had a title that called my name. Solnit writes of pilgrimages and labyrinths and has this to say of the latter:

 

In such spaces as the labyrinth, we cross over; we are really traveling, even if the destination is only symbolic, and this is in an entirely different register than is thinking about traveling or looking at a picture of a place we might wish to travel to. For the real is in this context nothing more or less than what we inhabit bodily. A labyrinth is a symbolic journey or a map of the route to salvation, but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world. If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one’s feet is real [travel] in a way that reading with one’s eyes alone is not. (p. 70)

 

A friend of mine who is a labyrinth facilitator (guide?) would probably appreciate this book, although I suspect she would be impatient with the way the author uses ‘labyrinth’ and ‘maze’ interchangeably, but Solnit did acknowledge on the following page that “many” people distinguish mazes from labyrinths (as does my friend), the former intending to confuse, the latter having only one possible route.

On Sunday morning, the day before Labor Day, I drove down to Cedar. There are many possible routes to take from my house to Cedar and back, and the Artist and I seldom returned north on the same roads we took south. I did not on Sunday morning, either. But, as always, I missed his presence acutely on all the familiar county roads, and so these words of Solnit’s struck a chord with me:

 

…Just as writing allows one to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent. Roads are a record of those who have gone before, and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there…. (p. 72)

 

Solnit had in mind “shepherds, hunters, engineers,” etc., but I had in mind my own past and a shared life. We did a lot of “riding around” and “county cruising.” Far from home, too, we sought out back roads, those less traveled, where we might explore at a slower pace than people anxious to get “from Point A to Point B” (as another friend of mine likes to travel). Most of my long walks, on the other hand, not only now that he’s gone but also in the last years of my life with the Artist, were taken with a dog or a friend or friends and dogs (example: in Arizona). He and I didn’t do a lot of walking together, I was thinking, so it’s no wonder my associations are stronger on county roads.

 

But as the book slipped out of my hands and I began to doze (there on the porch, a sweet breeze through the open windows and the dog lying quietly on the floor nearby), memories surged back. Walking home from downtown Kalamazoo, uphill, holding hands, past old historic houses, noticing architectural details. Long-ago nighttime walks through sleepy, dark, summer Leland. On Lake Michigan beaches and along the Lake Superior shore. Wading in the Crystal River (and picking off leeches afterward). A Christmas Day walk through deep snow in Houdek Dunes, having it all to ourselves, our footsteps the first. Strolling in Paris, in Avignon, and oh-so-memorably in Blesle, that sweet medieval village! And, of course, our last long walk through the dear meadow bordering Shell Lake.

In the Yoop

Avignon

Aux Crozes-Hauts -- and still alive!

An unexpected dream come true --

We had many, many memorable walks together over the years, I realize, and seeing them again in my mind, eyes closed, I re-read those happy days, my hand in his, the world sparkling around us.

 

In the meadow, two years ago --

September is a good month for walking, as well as for reading. 

 

And so, now that the season has turned the corner, I’ll be shortening up my open hours to take advantage of “locals’ summer,” adding Tuesday to Monday’s “by chance or appointment” on the schedule line: 

 

 

Dog Ears Books

FALL HOURS

September-October 2023

 

Monday-Tuesday: by chance or appointment

Wednesday – Saturday: 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Sunday: Closed

Time for "Locals' Summer"

We Look for Different Things

 

Sunny Juliet and I go for a long walk every morning, each of us exploring in her own way. My eyes are my foremost sense. For her, I suspect it’s her nose, but she uses her eyes, too, to spot something interesting up ahead, a reason to run up and inspect with her nose and then, often, give her teeth and taste buds a workout. 

The glove I dropped yesterday! I was looking for that!

Sunny notices visually either movement or novelty. If something appears that wasn’t there before, that’s something she has to check out. And if birds fly up out of a mesquite shrub or a cottontail or jackrabbit breaks its frozen pose to run, she’ll give chase – with equal success, I might add, in case of birds or bunnies. I’m looking at forms of mesquite, abandoned nests, seed pods of different sizes and colors, and speculating about remnants of old stone walls. I’m told that some of these courses of stonework were built to direct the flow of water during monsoon season, and that’s intriguing, but I also see pictures in my memory of two beloved former dogs posed on one particular section of wall.

Mesquite dragon growing from hackberry embrace...

...found life ended where it began.

Long a landmark for me, this one.

This more recently stumbled upon.

Sunny does not share my fascination with effects of light and shadow on distant mountains, and I do not share her enthusiasm for cow poop. Does she have memories of other times in the wash, from last spring or earlier this winter? I’ll never know.

 

While our interests are not identical, however, they are more or less compatible, and we both enjoy our rambles over the range together. At least, in our own fashion of “together.” It’s a bit the way the Artist and I enjoyed our books together. Each of us had literary loves not shared by the other, and we also enjoyed considerable overlap in our reading tastes, which is what allowed us to take such deep pleasure in reading aloud to, and being read aloud to by, the other. Of the three first books I’ve read in this new calendar year, I think he would have enjoyed most certain parts of On Trails but might have preferred the book I’m reading now, Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies, about a frontier expedition made in the 1830s. For the rest of you, here is my beginning-of-the-year recap:

 

1. Spragg, Mark. An Unfinished Life (fiction). I picked up this novel because I was absolutely crazy about the author’s memoir, Where Rivers Change Direction, but I hadn’t gotten very far at all into An Unfinished Life before I realized I’d seen the movie based on the book, and then as I read, I kept seeing scenes from the movie. The author and his wife worked on the screenplay, I read on the dust jacket. But I’ll say to you what I always say in cases like these, which is – if you haven’t seen the movie, read the novel first. And if you haven’t read the memoir, be sure to do that. It’s a completely different story but one not to be missed!

 

2. Moor, Robert. On Trails (nonfiction). I wasn’t sure I would read this book in its entirety. Thought maybe I’d dip into it, give a few pages a try. Well! Moor’s prologue tells of his hiking the Appalachian Trail, but the very fact that he put that in a prologue should have told me he had much, much more to say. Not only does he hike beyond the North American continent, not only does he investigate how animals other than human beings make trails, but he also investigates the notions of spiritual paths and introduces the idea of “desire lines,” as well as giving details of how public hiking trails are con- structed, so that as I read I kept thinking of more and more friends and family members and bookstore customers who would appreciate this book. He writes of how every hiker alters a trail:

 

Here is where the notion of the spiritual path, as portrayed in countless holy books, falters: scriptures tend to present the image of an unchanging route to wisdom, handed down from on high. But paths, like religions, are seldom fixed. They continually change—widen or narrow, schism or merge—depending on how, or whether, their followers elect to use them. Both the religious path and the hiking path are, as Taoists say, made in the walking. 

 

This is exactly what Henri Bergson said about life and about arguments of free will vs. determinism that depend on an image of a forking path and Moor has such a lovely philosophical turn of mind that I wish he had not dismissed Bergson as quickly as he did, but that was my only disappointment in a book that I highly recommend.

 

3. Brontë, Charlotte. Shirley (fiction). My admiration for Charlotte Brontë has grown by leaps and bounds through my reading of this novel. Set during the time of Napoleon, the story more than touches upon economic disruptions brought about not only by machinery but also by the war itself, the plight of those thrown out of work highlighted without demonizing factory owners struggling to avoid bankruptcy and ruin. Had I written the novel (there’s a dream for you!), I might have called it Caroline and Shirley, because it’s hard to say that only one of the two main female characters is “the” protagonist. In fact, Shirley comes into the story long after the character of Caroline has been established. Friendship between the two young women is based in large part on the recognition both have that their interests and values and thoughts are not those of other young women in their social circle. 

I can imagine readers who would be impatient at the long speeches the author sometimes puts in her characters’ mouths, more like carefully written and smoothly edited mini-essays than realistic conversation. I didn’t mind. I enjoyed them. And at other times dialogue moves swiftly, in short bursts like the thrusts of a fencing duel. There is even a passage in which I saw Caroline and Shirley as a kind of Greek chorus, delivering a description of a scene the author could have described herself more directly, and that struck me as a brilliant and fascinating experiment. 

Charlotte Brontë’s views of gender equality and social justice were way ahead of her time, and this book deserves a broad new modern audience.

 

Lose yourself in a book!

What do you look for in a book when you are reading purely for pleasure? Story, character, social commentary, mystery and surprise, crime and punishment, or something else entirely? If something else, what?