Scenes & Thoughts From Life & Lit

"Can we play ball?"

 

This is what spring looks like. 

 

At least, it is what the month of March so often looks like here in northern Michigan, as the calendar announces spring in the midst of continued snow and ice. 

 

But a thaw brings its own troubles. Frozen mud ruts are jarring, but a slithery mud wallow can be much more difficult to navigate. And do we want the 70-degree temperatures in March that family in Minnesota and Illinois had recently? I should say not! Heaven forbid the “darling buds of May” be tempted to open any earlier and risk a killing frost!

Future Mudbath Here

Meanwhile, living in a book –

 

Published in 1859, the action of George Eliot's Adam Bede takes place in 1799 against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, but world-historic events are not the author’s concern. We are told the time only because the narrator insists that “all this happened, you must remember, nearly sixty years ago,” and so, she says, we should not be surprised that Adam exhibits a touch of peasant superstition along with his keen intelligence or that “Hetty’s sphere of comparison was not large.” The novel's world is a circumscribed rural world of a bygone past but also includes the inner, infinitely complex worlds of the people who lived there in that time.

 

Reading Eliot's classic novel in the 21^st century, it is difficult to view it, as many did in 1859, as the “vile outpourings of a lewd woman’s mind.” Seduction, pregnancy, and infanticide do occur in the story, but hardly in “lewd” language. Of the seduction, we see only kisses and an arm around a waist, while the infant is more abandoned than murdered—criminal, yes, but neither violently nor without feeling—and between the seduction and the abandonment, the terrified flight of a young woman never before on her own in the world has her pregnancy named to us by the author only, circumspectly, as her “hidden dread.” There are no graphic scenes or language.

Winter continues.
Seasonal road season is not here yet.

Shocking readers was not George Eliot’s aim. Rather, she encouraged the enlargement of sympathy for our fellow creatures.

 

The story takes place at the turn of a century over 300 years ago. We see the faces of George Eliot’s characters as their own friends and families see them, and at the same time we feel the beating of their hearts as if those hearts were our own. Hopes, illusions, doubts and all the rest of the changing weather that passes through their souls we experience along with them as, along with what we see, there is what the author allows us to feel, which is more than we might for our own neighbors and friends whose hearts are hidden from us. As the omniscient narrator tells a story so universal that it might have taken place at any time in human history, we are introduced not only to people as they appear to each other but also to the inner lives of each. We see clearly the querulous, jealous mother-love of Lisbeth Bede, the near-worship of young Seth for his brother Adam, Adam’s hard and unforgiving judgment of those who lack his devotion to work, Hetty’s inability to feel sympathy for anyone’s feelings other than her own, and Dinah’s gentle saintliness that asks nothing for herself—and if Lisbeth and Seth and Adam, Hetty and Dinah were our neighbors we might stop with what we see and judge them by a single standard, much as does the voluble Mrs. Poyser, with her rock-ribbed sense that her view of things was the only right view. But granted access to their inner doubts, fears, and hopes, we share (if we are sympathetic readers) in the author’s sympathy for them all.

Weak sun trying its best to shine --

A friend and I were texting one recent morning about writers able to move readers to such sympathy. As I have long said of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, you might be unable, in real life, to tolerate sitting next to one of her characters on a long bus ride, but thanks to her insights into that character’s experiences and the marks it has left on the soul, a reader understands the why behind, for example, someone’s maddening anger or overwrought sensibility. By contrast, no subtlety or great knowledge of hearts is required to create a fictional hero or villain, only the willingness to play God and divide the human race into the saved and the damned. “An author needs a vision of human nature and unusual writing skill to produce characters that truly reflect reality,” my friend noted. 

Vision, skill—I would add that it takes generosity of spirit on the part of the writer, a largeness of soul. And a reader willing to open her own heart and mind to the vision of such a writer cannot help but feel increased sympathy for mankind in general.

 

How can it be that I never read this novel before? To think that I might have missed it entirely! It will be part of my mission as a bookseller to urge its reading to others, though I realize that not all readers will find it as compelling as I did because Adam Bede presents a couple of possible stumbling blocks for 21^st-century readers. 

First, there is the dialect. Repetition and context aid in translation, however, and a reader quickly realizes that ‘mun’ stands for ‘must,’ ‘war’ for ‘were,’ and ‘nor’ for ‘than.’ Also, the dialect is stronger in some characters’ speech than in others and occurs not at all in the exposition, so screw up your courage and dive in!

 

A more general stumbling block for many would be the novel’s opening pace. The story begins slowly and builds slowly. We see country people at their work and at their worship, the author in no hurry to cut to the action, her paragraphs long and dense with description. While impatience on the part of a reader will be ill rewarded, I can promise that once things begin to happen there are plenty of sudden scene changes and increasing drama.

Ice moving out of Omena Bay at last!

With eyes on the forecast –

 

I’m back in my bookshop today, for the first time since—was it really Thursday, March 12? Almost two weeks ago?! That’s what the double whammy of a couple feet of snow plus a debilitating cold will do to the most determined and intrepid bookseller. But she is back among the living, friends, and happy to be here for you once more.

Somewhere in the future will be more blue skies.

And now? Will I take spring break next week along with everyone else in Northport, the public school and our hardworking friends at New Bohemian Café? Is there a road trip in my near future? Or will I stay put and be a destination for someone else? Much depends on the weather, my friends, as is so often the case in our extraliterary lives, but I am here this week, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, for sure, March 25-27, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., so stop by if the spirit moves you. 

And someday soon Sunny will be rolling in clover!

Where I've Been Lately

I’ve been under the weather.

It’s hard to keep the days straight, but a week ago Saturday I expected to be in my shop and then could not get there because I had no plow-out at home until evening. I made a brief foray out into the world on Sunday before Monday dumped two feet of new snow. 

On Tuesday evening farmer/plow guy came with big tractor and monster snow blower, which allowed me to get out Wednesday to collect mail, purchase OTC relief for a nasty cold, and renew the license plate tab for my car, but since then I’ve stayed home, lying low, sleeping as much as possible. My laptop notified me that I spent 40% less time online in the past week than the week before. Duh! I'm sick! Leave me alone!

Here are a couple things I learned, hunches I followed up with online searches when finally I had the energy to pursue information again. If these tidbits keep one or two of my blog readers from being caught off-guard, it will be worth my mentioning them.

(1) A simple illness like a bad cold can bring on, trigger—mimic, if you prefer—depression. The scientific explanation has to do with cytokines and the body’s immune response, and my science nerd friends will want to follow up on the research in this area. For me, confirmation of my hunch was all-important to “bouncing back” (which I am doing in super-slow-motion), because at my lowest ebb I had no energy at all: no energy to care, to feel grateful, to feel hopeful, no energy to feel. And not feeling, not caring for or about anything but my own misery was worse than the misery itself. Everything dear and important seemed pointless. Life itself. Why go on?

Then on Saturday, the morning after the worst day, I woke up feeling, if not exactly “better,” at least not as completely terrible, and I cannot exaggerate the effect of that slight improvement. It was a re-entry into life! Still sick, coughing, and low on energy but able once again to smile when my phone's ping! announced a text from my special someone. Love was not an illusion, a sick joke played on me by a malevolent universe, and I was not dead to its wonder! I was reborn! Hallelujah!

(2) Coughing can cause [more] coughing. This was another hunch I had that proved out, and it’s a good reason to treat the symptom, in order to break the vicious cycle. 

I was still able to read — sometimes — off and on. 

At my worst, it was much more off than on, sleep too demanding to be denied. I would often wake from hours of sleep only to drag myself through a page or two before giving up, exhausted, to pull the covers over my head again. In better hours, though, the force of the story would pull me in and along, giving me as much of a reprieve from self-pity as I could hope to achieve. (Because self-pity was the absolutely most disgusting aspect of the whole thing!)

The Lincoln Reader, edited by Paul M. Angle, published in 1947, was one of that year's Book-of-the-Month Club selections. BOMC News, in announcing the choice, declared that while Angle’s book would have been impossible without all the previous books written about Lincoln (it borrows from many of them), it duplicated none of them. Angle’s selections are grouped according to the chronology of the subject’s life, beginning with “Kentucky Childhood” and proceeding through “Youth in Indiana,” “New Salem,” etc., all the way through Lincoln’s careers in law and politics, his presidency and the Civil War, to “Death—and a People’s Grief.” Let me quote from the BOMC News flier that accompanied the volume: 

[The book] is based on all the great biographies…. It draws from the intimate narratives of Nicolay and Hay, and from the priceless reminiscences of Herndon. It gets color and variety from the homely remarks of his contemporaries, many of them little known. It uses the newspaper reports of the political battles…. It includes off-the-record stories by a great many men and women who knew more than they would tell when Lincoln was alive. 

There are also sections in Lincoln’s own words, whether speeches given or letters written.

BOMC notes of distinguished Lincoln scholar Paul Angle that he “shepherds this flock of witnesses, and cuts them in and out like sheep in a moving picture…,” and as we proceed through the chapters we meet Lincoln from a variety of perspectives, both sympathetic and critical; from a distance, on state occasions, as well as in personal surroundings, alone or with his intimates, and the overall effect is that of living alongside him, in his times, from the first to last page of the book. 

Has there ever been a more American president than this gangly, rawboned, self-educated “Westerner”? For Kentucky and what we now call the Midwest were the West then (Michigan and beyond the Northwest), the country as raw as the man—not only the frontier but the capitol itself, Washington. This is how a member of the House of Representatives, Albert G. Biddle of Ohio’s Western Reserve, described the capitol when Lincoln arrived there in 1861:

 It was then as unattractive, straggling, sodden a town, wandering up and down the left bank of the yellow Potomac, as fancy can sketch. Pennsylvania Avenue, twelve rods wide, stretched drearily over the mile between the unfinished Capitol and the unfinished Treasury building on Fifteenth Street…. Illy paved with cobblestones, it was the only paved street of the town. The other streets, ... were long stretches of mud or deserts of dust and sand…. Not a sewer blessed the town, nor off of Pennsylvania Avenue was there a paved gutter. Each house had an open drain from its rear, out across the sidewalk. 

Squalid as were his surroundings, however, and informal as his manners could sometimes be, Lincoln’s presidential statements, within Cabinet meetings or to the public at large, were marked by thoughtfulness, principle, and dignity. His entire first term of office was passed in wartime, the first shots at Fort Sumter fired on April 12, scant weeks following the new president’s March 4, 1861, inauguration. Lincoln sought and carefully weighed advice from his Cabinet and his generals. He never thought he knew more than anyone else but accepted the fact that the ultimate decisions granted him in the Constitution were his responsibility. 

During his first inaugural address, Lincoln appealed to Americans’ sense of shared history and contiguous land, reminding them, “We are not enemies, but friends.” Then, perhaps more practically, “We must not be enemies.” On March 4, 1865, the war all but concluded (Lee would surrender to Grant on April 9) and his re-election accomplished, Lincoln’s inaugural address acknowledged the price suffered by four years of bloody conflict, a longer, greater, and more awful war than either side had anticipated. His final words that day are justly famous:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

Angle’s book, in giving me a fuller picture of Lincoln the man than I ever had before, also gave me a much clearer realization of his greatness.

And now, as I slowly come back to my own ever-so-modest role in the human race, still resting a lot between short bursts of housework (not really “bursts” at my current speed, to be honest), having so enjoyed The Mill on the Floss, I am reading another novel by George Eliot, Adam Bede. At the beginning of Book Two, the author addresses her readers directly to explain her reasons for choosing the characters she does. That they are not mythic heroes or villains, she readily acknowledges, but if she chose to present only such unrealistic figures, making it obvious where readers should admire and approve and where they should condemn and hate,

[W]hat will you do then with your fellow-parishioner who opposes your husband in the vestry?—with your newly-appointed vicar, whose style of preaching you find painfully below that of his regretted predecessor?—with the honest servant who worries your soul with her one failing?—with your neighbor, Mrs. Green, who was really kind to you in your last illness, but has said several ill-natured things about you since your convalescence?—nay, with your excellent husband himself, who has other irritating habits besides that of not wiping his shoes?

She continues, without breaking her paragraph as I have done here:

These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are, …and it is these people—amongst whom your life is passed—that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people, whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire—for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience.

Content to tell her “simple story,” the author tells us, she dreads nothing but falsity, noting that “things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome” and that she would rather reconcile us to love each other despite our faults and flaws than to be indifferent or coldly prejudiced against one another. Another author would have portrayed the character Hetty, for example, very differently. Eliot’s portrait is kindly and leads us to be more generous in our estimation:

…Hetty’s was a spring-tide beauty; it was the beauty of young frisking things, round-limbed, gambolling, circumventing you by a false air of innocence—the innocence of a young star-browed calf, for example, that, being inclined for a promenade out of bounds, leads you a severe steeple-chase over hedge and ditch, and only comes to a stand in the middle of a bog.

Yes, I think George Eliot may become one of my favorite writers.

Someone has been a spectacularly good girl!

You know who I’m talking about! Sunny Juliet has been an angel dog for her momma this past dreadful week! Who walks my dog for me while I’m sick? She walks herself! I bundle up in my barn coat and sit in the porch doorway while Sunny goes out and tends to her business. She may do a little wandering around the yard and exploring, but there have been no long walkabouts: no, she has stuck close to the house and has come back without calling, sometimes so quickly that I order her back to “Run around! Run, run, run!” before we go back indoors together. I could not have asked for an easier, more compliant, easy-going companion than Sunny has been during what has to have been an incredibly boring stretch of days for her. Good dog! I am so proud of her and grateful for her presence! 

Grateful, too, for all the offers of assistance and get-well wishes by text and other means that have come my way. Thank you all for your caring concern! It means the world to me.

Spring in Warwickshire, Winter Continues in Leelanau

March 20, 2025: snow

March 31, 2025: ice

Is this March all that completely different from the Marches of other years? I look back at photographs on my phone from March 2025 and see snow and ice, snow and ice. If the snow was not as deep last year, the ice was more damaging that what we have had this year—so far! Some say with Shakespeare that April is the cruelest month. I say March is crueler— more a steady, harsh prolongation of winter than a teasing alternation of winter and spring.

May 14, 2025: pear blossoms

Spring! Will we really be granted another? Will we see May blossoms again if we only hang in there patiently? Surely, yes! And every hour of beautiful May will be filled not only with that hour’s beauty but also with memories of former springs, memory deepening perception to swell each moment to overflowing.

The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet, what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows,—such things as these are the mother-tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle, inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.

- George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

William Allen Neilson, who edited the Harvard Classics edition of The Mill on the Floss, calls the novel “substantially true [to the author’s life] though intentionally altered in details,” as George Eliot took her own girlhood as a model for that of her heroine, Maggie Tulliver, and the terrain of Warwickshire in the English Midlands as the inspiration for Maggie’s beloved home country. That much is hardly surprising, is it? Neilson notes that Dickens did the same in David Copperfield and Thackeray in Pendennis. Never having been an English major, I know of great literature and writers only what I have read and so was taken by surprise to learn that Mary Ann Evans (as she was born), in addition to writing novels, was first assistant editor of the Westminster Review in London and at the same time translated Essence of Christianity, by the German philosopher Feuerbach into English! Translated Feuerbach? Really?

Another surprise awaited me in the novel itself. Nothing I ever heard of George Eliot had led me to expect humor in her writing. And yet, why be surprised? Thackery’s satirical portrayals of church and society, as well as the unforgettably broad characters of Charles Dickens, surely delighted their authors in the hours of their creation, so why should George Eliot, in the same literary-historical period, not do her own skewering of pretense and eccentricity? Early on in the story, Eliot gives us a conversation between the parents of young Tom and Maggie Tulliver. The husband is more or less thinking aloud, meditating on further schooling for their son, Tom, hardly expecting thoughtful contributions from the wife he chose because she was not quick-witted enough to challenge him with ideas of her own, so he is not at all taken aback when plump, pretty, blond, shallow-minded Mrs. Tulliver replies only to what she hears and understands, rather than to what her husband says.

“But,” continued Mr. Tulliver after a pause, “what I’m a bit afraid on is, as Tom hasn’t got the right sort o’ brains for a smart fellow. I doubt he’s a bit slowish. He takes after your family, Betsy.”

“Yes, that he does,” said Mrs. Tulliver, accepting the last proposition entirely on its own merits; “he’s wonderful for liking a deal o’ salt in his broth. That was my brother’s way, and my father’s before him.”

Besides lyrical descriptions of natural beauty and sharply satirical portraits of human beings in relationships, the author makes the occasional general observation on humanity. Here is one that struck me forcibly today, as violence unleashed around the world triggers repercussions nearer home:

So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other’s sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.

Men, women, and children, we understand George Eliot to be saying, as Tom and Maggie suffer their father’s bankruptcy, as well as the primary blame their mother’s family places squarely on their father and secondarily on their mother for having married him. (So in today’s reckless, ill-considered war, undertaken principally by two dictatorial heads of state, repercussions are being felt around the world. Will unmerited pain or “justice” will be greater in the end? What are the odds?)

Even as the girl Maggie’s repeated bursting into tears annoyed me, I enjoyed The Mill on the Floss much more than I had expected I would and put off reaching the final pages by setting the book aside over and over again. 

Thursday I got to my bookshop for the scheduled four hours (as I had on Wednesday, also), entertaining a total of two drop-in visitors in all that time (a quieter day than even Wednesday had been), and then the forecast for Friday was so dire that I planned a snow day, along with all the schools in Leelanau County, and made a lazy day of it at home, with a lot of reading and the reorganization of one cupboard. The forecast for Saturday was sunshine, however, and I planned to get back to my shop. 

Friday sun and shadows

So much for plans! My driveway wasn’t plowed until 5:30 p.m.! Sorry I couldn't get my shop open for a sunny Saturday!

Which brings me to Sunday, my usual at-home day, with a near-blizzard raging outside my blessedly warm farmhouse. I say “near-blizzard” advisedly, having been instructed that ‘blizzard’ is a very precise category of storm. So far our winds are only 23-25 mph, not the 35 mph that they would need to be for blizzard designation. In addition, we would need not just blowing snow but whiteout conditions for three hours. So today’s snowstorm is not a blizzard, but if it dumps two feet of snow, a lot of us may be snowed in for another couple of days. One can be snowbound without a blizzard.

Sunday morning

Does Sunny like the snow? She is eager to go outdoors, happy to run around the yard and "make snow angels" (in her own way—you wouldn’t recognize them as such—I think she’s only scratching her back), but there’s not much reluctance on her part when her momma tells her it’s time to go inside again. 

"Ready for breakfast, Momma!"

Sunny and I came indoors for breakfast about 9 o'clock. By 4 p.m. the walk I had cleared in the morning was buried eight inches deep in new snow. Sunny was floundering in it, up to her belly. And it was still coming down....

I hope my snowbound friends have plenty of books to get them through these days!

Michigan Winter-Spring

Wednesday there was ice. Freezing rain, sleet, call it what you will, it wore no body armor, nor did it carry lethal weapons! It was but a reminder to slow down and exercise caution. And after all, it is March in Michigan. By bedtime and the next morning, ground that had been briefly bare was again covered with snow. The bad news is that we have a blizzard warning for Sunday; however, the good news is that Thursday dawned clear and sunny, and the snowy, ice-covered world sparkled. Better than diamonds! No mining necessary! Ephemeral beauty is the best kind, isn’t it? “Everything is temporary!”

Yes, everything is temporary, grief is the price of love, and death is the price of life. 

    “It’s the bargain we made. No, we didn’t make it.” 

    “Someone else signed us up.”

True, I’m glad they did. I wouldn't have wanted to miss it. Because in this often sorrowful world, there is also joy. The world—life—is everything all at once, though our tiny minds can only focus on a small sliver at a time. 

Here’s some good news: Bonnie Jo Campbell has a new book coming out in October and has more or less promised to make another visit to Northport.

Here’s more good news: I have Fleda Brown’s new book of poems in stock NOW! It’s what you need, I assure you. I know I do.

        I am over the hump of the buying demographic.

I can drive my old car off the ends of the earth for all

anyone cares. The young are removing me from their

sight as if they were the first humans, inventing fire.

- Fleda Brown, “This Week,” in The End of the Clockwork Universe

The young cannot remember being old, as we old ones remember (so well!) being young. It doesn’t matter. The astonishing thing is how young the old can still feel—when glances meet, hands touch, the sun shines, winter aconites bloom, and a breeze lifts a thin lock of grey hair as if it were a girl’s raven-black bangs.

The other evening I thought I would read George Elliot’s The Mill on the Floss but somehow couldn’t open the book and picked up instead Michael Zadoorian’s The Leisure Seeker, a road trip story featuring an old woman and an old man, she with cancer and he with dementia. Does that sound depressing? It isn’t. There are moments of aching sweetness throughout the book, humor, suspense, and a tone of resolute determination that runs through the wife’s narration.

When does the last road trip come? How often do people know at the time that it’s their last ? 

My travels may be more modest from now on, but they are not over. My memory is not gone, either, and I am still making new, happy memories. Occasionally happiness feels selfish and self-indulgent, given all the tragedy in today’s world, but more often I feel that it is part of gratitude, an acknowledgement of the abundant gifts I have received, and I have many reasons to be grateful for my life, here in its eighth decade.

And do I want another spring? Am I impatient for its arrival? Oh, my friends, does a bear shit in the woods, and is the pope Catholic?!

P.S. Beautiful end to the sunny day here. 

A few books, a few words

 

"What's with all this reading, anyway?"

Earth may be blown to smithereens (one of my mother’s oddball words) any day now, but until that happens I continue to go to my bookshop, continue to communicate with friends with phone calls, texts, emails, letters, and in-person conversations, go for walks with my dog, and yes, I am still reading. Here is the list of the books I’ve read since the beginning of the year. There are not as many as usual for over two months into 2026’s twelve, but here they are:

1. Binet, Laurent. Perspective(s) (fiction, 2023)

2. Raskin, Jamie. Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy (nonfiction, 2022)

3. Letts, Elizabeth. The Perfect Horse: The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis (nonfiction, 2016)

4. Giffels, David. Barnstorming Ohio to Understand America (nonfiction, 2020)

5. Field, Isobel. This Life I’ve Loved (nonfiction, 1937)

6. Stevenson, Robert Louis. An Inland Voyage (nonfiction, 1878)

7. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Crossing the Plains (nonfiction)

8. Sixsmith, Martin. The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (nonfiction, 2009)

9. Morris, Heather. The Tattooist of Auschwitz (fiction, 2018)

10. Hill, Justin. The Drink and Dream Teahouse (fiction, 2002)

11. Paton, Alan. Cry, the Beloved Country (fiction, 1948)

12. Buchan, Elizabeth. Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman (fiction, 2002)

13. Power-Greene, Ousmane K. The Confessions of Matthew Strong (fiction, 2022)

14. Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Scotch (nonfiction, 1964)

15. Paul, Elliot. Linden on the Saugus Branch (nonfiction, 1947)

16. MacDonald, Ross. Sleeping Beauty (fiction, 1973)

17. MacDonald, Ross. The Name is Archer (fiction, 1946-1983)

Make what you will of my Books Read 2026 list so far. Ask questions if you have them. I can tell you that I am currently reading Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree at bedtime; with dinner, a book about trees written for artists (forget title and author name; the book is at home, and I am not); began The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jim Robbins, sitting in my car by the side of an icebound inland lake; and have a George Elliot novel, The Mill on the Floss in the wings, ready to follow Thomas Hardy.

Sometimes I find it hard to justify (to myself) the hours I spend reading books while the country and the world fall apart; however, giving up the hope of making certain others care about what breaks my heart, I am now spending less time online, having realized at long last that sharing and forwarding stories to people who either deleted my messages without reading them or maybe even blocked me and never saw the messages at all was a lost cause. As long as they continue circling their golden calf and cheering him as their savior (incomprehensible!), they will be unable to take in messages that conflict with their "true belief.” (Here's another.) Time to re-read Eric Hoffer?

I won’t deny, either, that much of my reading is escape (just look at the dates of some of those novels and memoirs and travel books), but who wouldn’t want to escape from a present in which one’s own beloved country bombs a children’s elementary school in another country, kills over a hundred schoolgirls, and our “leaders” express not a single word of regret? Everything else—all the threats to voting rights, violations of the Constitution, outright lies left and right, incompetence and corruption—all of it pales for me in the light of those dead schoolgirls. Will Iran be better off now that the Ayatollah is gone? Those little girls, dead, are not better off. You think opposing abortion regardless of circumstances means you reverence life, and yet you say nothing in opposition to these murders? And because I am an American, these murders were done in my name, also! For shame, America! For shame!

Beautiful earth! Beautiful trees and mountains, lakes and rivers, hills and prairies alive with life! Potentially beautiful human animals with your lacerated hearts and stumblings and gettings-up-again and attempts to love one another! Open your eyes!

Beautiful Michigan!

Bookstores, Libraries, Paperbacks, and Hope

Bookstores and Libraries Together

I have written more than once on this blog about how I see booksellers and librarians as colleagues, not competitors. Today I want to take a different angle and look at the places themselves and how they operate in our communities. Again, I don’t see it as a competition. Both, in my view, fulfill essential functions, some but not all of which overlap—which is why both are essential. 

 

Both bookstores and libraries provide books to the reading public, hold author events (often collaboratively), and offer breathing space away from life’s hustle and bustle. A bookseller, like a librarian, is happy to answer questions and to make recommendations (although I am not the swiftest when asked on the spot for a recommendation). Our missions and our realities overlap.

Bookstore event

Library event

Coming back to add something about audiobooks. Library patrons (anyone with a library card) can order audio books through Libby. I believe those are free to borrow. Bookstore customer-friends can buy audio books through Libro.fm and choose a specific participating indie bookstore’s portal, e.g., Dog Ears Books.

A library’s advantages over those of a bookstore are probably obvious. As a local tax-supported institution, a library can loan its books out with no charge. People who worry about accumulating books need have no concerns on that score, either: they simply read borrowed books and return them. In Michigan, moreover, if a local library doesn’t have a particular book a patron wants, the book can be borrowed from another library in the state, and in Leelanau County our township libraries provide many other township contacts and services besides books.

Julie, our lovely librarian in Northport

It may be harder to see at first glance what a bookstore can offer that a library cannot, and a shop specializing in used and rare books will obviously be different from one stocking and selling new books exclusively, but I do see a few ways that my business has an edge over publicly funded libraries, and maybe—I’m not sure here; what do you think?—a lot of it boils down to eccentricity.

 

I don’t have to answer to a boss or a board of directors or local officials or even, except to the extent that my business must be profitable to remain in existence, public demand, which means I can give shelf room to authors whose popularity peaked 100 years ago (they are here to be rediscovered by younger generations), to books in foreign languages (despite Americans’ resolute devotion to monolinguism, as if there were something unpatriotic in knowing anything other than Yankee English), and to beautifully bound classics (for readers who like to see volumes permanently available to them on their home shelves and not just ephemeral words on the screen of an electronic device). Being “my own boss” allows me to curate a collection in line with my personal values, taking a long view on what’s worth reading, rather than having to de-acquisition books that popular culture considers past their shelf life. 

One of the few librarians I found difficult (he was not trained as a librarian, I should make clear) once justified putting a major philosophy classic and a major literary classic in the books-for-sale section on the grounds that “they’re just old books.” Yes, they were, and important ones, too. And to be fair, I have to say that the librarian in question needed shelf room for books his local public wanted to read. His was not a research library. Whereas, if I think a book has value (in the broad sense, not the narrow monetary sense), I can keep it on the shelf year after year, waiting for the person who recognizes its importance.

There’s more. Having grown up in the era of the nuclear arms race, I always tend to think apocalyptically, and so I can’t help wondering sometimes if e-books don’t constitute a danger to printed books. I am not thinking about sales figures but about the continued existence and availability of important works into the future. Think about the way that digital storage formats change over time. Quickly! Add to that the possibility that digital texts can be altered before delivery. I see part of my mission as preservation. 

 

If the Internet vanished tomorrow, do you have a good dictionary in your home? A copy of the U.S. Constitution? A book of maps? Plays, poems, novels? I started to use the names of playwrights and poets and novelists in that last question but then deleted them, as there is no way to list all whose work deserves to be preserved. 

So when I put on my shop door the sticker reading “Bookstores Save Democracy,” I mean no disrespect to libraries, which also serve to save democracy. Our missions are completely compatible.

 

Disappearance of MMPs

A comment on a recent post asked me if the coming elimination of paperback books by publishers would have an impact on my business. What’s happening is that so-called “mass market paperbacks,” the kind I refer to as “grocery store books,” are being phased out, not the better bound “trade” paperbacks. Trade paperbacks (which are much easier to hold open and read and may take the place of hardcover books as first releases, as they are much less expensive) will continue to be published. 

 

Robert Gray wrote on “Shelf Awareness” this Thursday that he had a “curious double response” to the news that new mass market paperbacks would no longer be published. Years ago their affordability seduced him, and yet he could not remember the last time he had bought one. 

 

I remember when a new bookstore came to the town where I grew up. It was on the main downtown street, all the books were new, colorful paperbacks, and all hovered around a price of 35 cents. My first purchase was a red (I remember the cover) 35-cent paperback copy of Catcher in the Rye. A few years later, when I purchased at the university bookstore a paperback copy of James Joyce's Ulysses, it was a larger format and carried a whopping price of $2.95. That book, with tape-reinforced spine, is still in my possession 60 years later.

One problem with cheap paperback books, other than cheap paper, was that their glued binding did not hold up well over time, which accounts for the prices of collectible paperback books with original covers intact, the illustrated cover often accounting for most of the value of the book.

Hope: Life’s One Essential? 

I was told there are only three essentials in life: someone to love, someone to be loved by, and hope for the future. I have been mulling over that wisdom and have provisionally concluded (willing to listen to arguments) that hope is the most essential. Because, think about it: if you love and are loved but have no hope for the future, won’t you be tempted to follow the example of Stefan Zweig and his second wife, who committed suicide together? Yet even alone, even downright miserable, if you have hope for the future, that hope can include the possibility of finding someone to love. --But then (I go on to reflect), love, once known, never really vanishes, does it? To have a future, however, demands that we hold onto hope.

But what do you think? Or should I ask, how do you feel?

 

 

Note to customers: I have restocked Blood Brothers, by Elias Chacour, with David Hazard. Talk about hope! Wow!

Spring WILL come again!