Evenings Out, Mornings Outdoors, and Books as AntifragileTechnology

Evenings Out

It is rare for me to go out in the evening, other than outdoors in my own yard, but July is the month when the Friends of the Leelanau Township Library hold their Summer Writers Series, featuring one Michigan author a week for four weeks. The third week of the series this year was author and farmer and chef Abra Berens, and not only was she FOLTL guest author on Tuesday but the following Thursday she prepared a special chef’s dinner, also at the Willowbrook Inn. Two nights out in one week!

Abra Berens at the Willowbrook Inn

Sommelier du soir

The Willowbrook is a magical event venue, elegant and at the same time simple and old-fashioned. Mimi DiFrancesca and Joel Heberlein, in transforming the 140-year-old building, have only added to its charm, such that it is always a joy to be there. The windows invite the outdoors in, giving the feeling that one is in a very grand and spacious treehouse. And this time, of course, there was Abra’s wonderful menu, served by friendly faces, many of them familiar. Quite the evening out!

Also noteworthy is that a portion of ticket sales from Thursday’s dinner went to Food Rescue, people doing much-needed and important work in northern Michigan.

My role in the program came following dessert and was – no surprise! – selling books that Abra happily signed for her satisfied diners. Sunny Juliet was ready for play when I got home, and I was ready for sleep, but we worked it out.

 

Books are my life.

Sunny amusing her dog momma at bedtime --

Mornings Outdoors

 

In my life, mornings mean outdoors, and while that’s usually in our own yard, sometimes Sunny Juliet and I go farther afield. Friday we did what I call “Go for a ride, go for a walk,” where we get in the car and have a leash walk (or two or three) somewhere other than our familiar home grounds, with stops also simply to give the dog momma a chance to photograph lovely sights. 

That pond on Alpers Road again --

Books as Antifragile Technology

 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (and my, how that name keeps cropping up in my posts lately!) does not have an entry for ‘books’ in the index to his book Antifragile,’ but because BOOK is an important topic in my life, not only as a reader but also as a bookseller, I have added the term to his index, noting the number of each page where books enters the discussion. First, in the chapter on “Via Negativa,” he notes that “the future is mostly in the past,” by which he means that the longer a technology or a way of doing things has survived, the longer it probably will continue to survive. This means that, contrary to human beings, with technologies and ways of doing things, the older will typically survive the younger. Following that logic (and he gives several examples), we can predict with some assurance that the continued life of the printed book will greatly surpass that of the e-reader.

 

“No one reads books any more,” people told me when I opened my bookstore 31 years ago – hence my new motto: 

Surviving skeptics for over 200 dog years

 -- though I’m happy to say the skeptics seem fewer in number with each passing year, as more and more people seem to rediscover books and realize that paper and print are here to stay. In fact, I rarely hear the dismissive, skeptical claim about books so often voiced three decades ago.

Oldest on the premises -- at present

Taleb distinguishes between the perishable (objects) and the nonperishable, the latter having what he calls an “informational nature to it.”

 

A single car is perishable, but the automobile as a technology has survived about a century and a half (and we will speculate should survive another one). Humans die, but their genes—a code—do not necessarily. The physical book is perishable—say, a specific copy of the Old Testament—but its contents are not, as they can be expressed into another physical book [my emphasis added].

 

In this passage we deal with the technology of the book in a different way, not predicting the life of the technology but the “imperishability” of the information it carries. 

 

What of the perennial human craving for novelty, for whatever is “new and improved”? Anything that has an electronic on/off switch, Taleb thinks, is something that can induce neomania in us – the feeling that we have to have the very latest model – whereas what he calls “the artisanal” (and I take it this could be a book as well as a painting by an Old Master or a piece of furniture, examples he cites) continues to be satisfying even as newer items are available all around us. Thus the artisanal is antifragile, the electronic fragile to time and change. 

 

The e-reader is fragile in another way that the book is not. Accessibility to electric power, battery life, and the general fatigue that overtakes computerized parts all make the e-reader more fragile than the bound, printed volume. How many laptops have you gone through in the past 30 years? But do you have a paperback book from college days in the Sixties? I do – and it still “works” perfectly, as do these volumes from the late nineteenth century.

These have endured.

Taleb received a letter from a historian Paul Doolan in Zurich, asking how young people could be taught skills for the 21^stcentury, since we have no way of knowing what skills will be needed. Taleb’s perhaps surprising answer (perhaps not, if you’ve been reading his work) is to have those young people read the classics. This is where the sentence appears: “The future is in the past.” 

 

We cannot return to the past, and few of us would choose to do so. The wisdom of the past, however, the accumulated knowledge of our culture is the legacy to us of all who have lived before, and we can avoid many errors by learning what hasn’t worked out well for our human ancestors. 

 

What is success, for an individual, a corporation, or a culture? Taleb tells us the most important factor is the avoidance of unsurvivable error or the unforeseeable, rare but unsurvivable event. Mere survival does not insure success, but there is no success without survival, so it is crucial to avoid that fatal misstep.

 

We cannot learn from what has not (yet) happened or what might happen, only from what has happened.

History: Learn from it.

Any Day Now…

"Cherry-ripe," wrote poet Robert Herrick of Julia's lips.

Trees are full of cherries, and equipment is in place (shaker, truck, vats) for tart cherry harvest in the orchard around my old farmhouse. My guess is that the farmer is only waiting for the Brix reading to be right where he wants it. 

 

Meanwhile, trees so full of cherries are not so full of leaves, so there’s another question, and my tentative answer is tied to the fact that my black walnut tree (not sprayed with anything) is also dropping a lot of leaves. I think the trees are hedging their bets. In the economy of a plant, it’s the seeds that matter for the future: leaves are there to take in needed nutrition, and when that work is done, and as we come into hotter, drier weather, the tree’s economy is best served with fewer expenditures of moisture – a sparser population to provide for, in other words. That is the explanation of a bookseller, not a scientist, you realize.

 

Yes, summer is hurrying along, and on Sunday morning I saw the season’s first goldenrod in bloom. In July!

 

Sneaky little devils!

I have monarda and tall phlox blooming now in my garden. Black raspberries keep on coming, too, and I finally have two batches of my patented (not really, but it is my specialty) ‘blackstraw’ jam made, with no end in sight. I use twice to three times the amount of raspberries to the smaller amount of Bardenhagen (local) strawberries, and mine is cooked, not freezer jam, because I don’t want to worry about losing all my work in the event of a winter power outage. For the same reason, when fall arrives I will be drying and saucing my apples. Let’s not have fall arrive too soon, though! That goldenrod makes me nervous….

 

Jammin'!

Time flies by because these are busy days, and the coming week will be an endurance test for this old bookseller. I will be closing at 3 p.m. on both Tuesday and Thursday this week, selling books at events at the Willowbrook Inn both evenings. Tuesday is the third of four FOLTL Summer Writers Series evenings, with Abra Berens as guest author. Northport claims Abra for her eight years at Bare Knuckle Farm and Friday farmers market. Her three cookbooks are Grist (grains), Ruffage (vegetables), and the latest, Pulp (fruit). Doors for her presentation open at 6:30 (with cash bar), and the event will begin at 7 p.m. It's free, and the public is cordially invited.

 

Showcasing Abra's books today in Northport --

Abra will be doing a special chef’s dinner on Thursday, but if you don’t have tickets already for that, you're too late. Not surprisingly, tickets to the dinner sold out early. Here is an interesting, if slightly outdated, interview where you can learn more about author/farmer/chef Abra Berens.

 

Is it any wonder my reading is suffering these days for lack of time? Between customers at the bookstore, slowly I make my way through Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, but at home there seems to be very little reading time at all, what with (Sunday, for example) hanging laundry out in the sun, watering gardens when it doesn’t rain, mowing grass, making jam, and, on all-too-rare occasions, vacuuming floors and catching up on recording and filing business expenses and decluttering (which means picking up things I dropped on chairs rather than putting them away throughout the week, because the majority of my time at home, when not sleeping, is spent outdoors). Every morning lately has also held a stint of editing, rather than the reading in bed with morning coffee that I did all winter and spring. But soon I will make time to read new books, and then I will report to you on some of them.

 

Part of every single day, of course, involves outdoor time with Sunny Juliet. We take long walks, work on agility practice, and have agility sessions with Coach Mike. I throw tennis balls for her, and there are frequent though unscheduled romps with her new friend and neighbor, Griffin. Below are Griffin and Sunny at rest (rather than running like crazy or wrestling and rolling around, which allowed me to get a halfway decent photograph of them for a change), although they are “resting” in this shot only because Sunny had retreated from the field of play, determined to keep possession of one of her precious tennis balls. 

Griffin and Sunny take a little break.

Do you think life is going to slow down? Any day now? Ha! Not a chance! Yet I recall, dimly, the long summer days of girlhood, when hours barely seemed to move at all, and if we try we can still find a few moments like that now and then. Make them, I should say. 

My little heaven on earth --

Another point of view --

Sharing a Few of My Secrets

Lake Michigan from Jelinek Road

 

I see things that aren’t there.

 

The probability that you would spot a great blue heron wading at the corner of M-22 and Jelinek Road is low -- not impossible but unlikely. I’ve only seen a heron once at that corner, hunting in an ephemeral pool after a heavy rain, stalking – what? Surely not fish? What year was that? No matter. Whenever I make that turn, I look for the heron and see him in memory.

 

Not much farther up Jelinek Road I see the buck that leapt in front of our van one evening at dusk, missing the windshield by a hair, only missing at all because the Artist had seen it in time to be able to brake. We could not have been closer to the animal unless we’d collided. That spot in the road holds that incident for me.

 

Still on the same long, curving climb is where we pulled over to the side of the road and sat quietly for an hour or more, hoping to see some noteworthy celestial event, the nature of which I have forgotten. Was it a comet? Whatever it was, we never did see it, our view open to the west but not to the north. Still, it was restful and pleasant to be sitting out there by the side of the road on a summer evening, doing absolutely nothing but looking at the sky and talking to each other. And then we did see something: the International Space Station passed overhead! Neither of us had ever seen it before, and I have not seen it since, but I see again in imagination what I saw with the Artist that night in the evening sky.

 

All of these sights – heron, buck, ISS – I see over and over, although they are not there for anyone else to see who travels that road. And I have not even covered a mile on a single road with these examples, so imagine the many invisible (to you) sights I see along every Leelanau County road….

 

 

My life is a setup for coincidence. 

 

When my sisters and I drove down to Good Harbor a week ago Sunday, I pointed out another memory corner of M-22, this one between Leland and Glen Arbor. There in the woods used to be an unusual tourist attraction. It wasn’t exactly stations of the cross, as I recall it, but giant billboard-like paintings from the life of Jesus that one encountered along a winding path. I called them ‘dioramas’ when describing them, but they weren’t really that: as I say, more like billboards. But what was the place called? Not that my sisters cared, but I wanted to remember. One would occasionally come across an old postcard showing one of the scenes….

 

Well, the very next day I was going through a milk crate filled with booklets and ephemera and came across what I thought would be a menu (it was that size) from the Leland Lodge. It wasn’t a menu but did advertise the Lodge as available for large group dinners. What caught my eye, though, was a list of tourist sights near Leland. The dunes were on the list, of course, but so was -- Lund’s Scenic Garden! That was it! 

 

Not everyone is surrounded on a daily basis by old books and papers, which is why I say my life is a setup to invite coincidences.

 

 

Sometimes I DO dog-ear a book!

 

Rarely do I turn down the corner of a page … or underline sentences … or write notes in the margins. But sometimes I do all of those things to a book, though I never, ever use highlighters on book pages.

 

In almost every case, the book I mark up has to be a paperback, it has to be used, and if I’m dog-earing and underlining and writing notes in the margin and sometimes making my own index (if one isn’t provided) or adding to an existing index (if one exists) – if I’m doing all those things, it’s because I’m working with the book, treating it as an assignment I’ve given myself, wanting to make sure I don’t miss important ideas and information.

 

One book I treated that way last month was Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, which took me a long time to get through, because it was so upsetting (although I highly recommend it) that I couldn’t read all that much at a time. This month, at the shop and between customers, the book I am treating with apparent disrespect but, really, with my highest respect (isn’t it respect when one engages fully with someone’s words?) is Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Fortunately, Antifragile is not a world-historical horror show but a fascinating and original way of looking at the world in general and human life in particular. Taleb’s runaway bestseller, the book that put him on the map, was The Black Swan, which I have not yet read, and since all his books grow from one central idea and since he has his own somewhat idiosyncratic vocabulary that carries through all the books, I am picking up his language piecemeal as I go.…

 

I am an introvert at heart.

 

This is a secret shared by many booksellers and librarians. We grew up with books as friends and had adventures in stories, and thus we are not the greatest of “party animals.” We were often shy as children and have had to work to overcome our shyness. My first summer selling books (yes, in Northport), I began each day with butterflies in my stomach, anticipating the ordeal of facing and talking to strangers! It probably took five years before I realized how shy many other people are. That was a growing-up lesson.

 

When someone comes into my bookstore for the first time (as is true whenever anyone enters a bar or restaurant or retail establishment for the first time), that person is entering “my turf” and trusting that the atmosphere will be welcoming, so it is (my tardy realization here) part of my role to put people at ease, to assuage their shyness rather than to indulge my own. Whether they want to browse without interference or have questions or want suggestions is up to them, and I try to be aware of those differences. There is no single way to treat all potential customers.

 

 

Sometimes I read on the job.

 

For one thing, reading books is part of my job, my sister reassured me years ago, but it’s also a way that my introvert self can stay out of the way of people who need to make their own discoveries and have their own experiences in my bookstore. I do look up and greet everyone who comes in and often ask if they want a particular subject area. If someone is looking lost, I’ll ask if that person has a question. But I don’t follow people around pushing books at them. Who comes into a bookstore for that?

 

 

I make things up as I go along.

 

Bookstore hours are something I’ve tried to keep consistent throughout each season. Last year Sunday was always a day off, Monday a BCOA (by chance or appointment) day. This year those days are sometimes reversed, and Tuesdays in July are different from Tuesdays in June and August, because the FOLTL Summer Writers Series takes place on Tuesday evenings at the Willowbrook Mill, and since I am on hand to sell books at those events, my Tuesday bookstore hours in July are only 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Every year I make up my schedule season by season, or even month by month.

Tonight's featured author and book, 7 p.m.

It should be no surprise that I make up prices on my used books. For the more expensive items, I try to stay in the general ballpark of the national market; other times, with inexpensive books, or when I need room, there are bargains to be had! Right now, for instance, I have my rolling cart full of $3, mostly hardcover books, some of them minor classics, such as Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, by Cornelius Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough. How many times did I read that book when I was young?

 

 

I love my work!

 

For years I worked at jobs that made me very unhappy. My parents had insisted I take a typing class in high school so I would have “something to fall back on,” and I fell back repeatedly, year after year, going to school for a while and then dropping out to go back to fulltime work I found terribly uncongenial. We natural introverts are, I think, often unhappy when we have bosses, but we don’t like bossing other people, either, which makes having my own one-woman bookstore the perfect work world for me.

 

But I love going home, too. 

 

Much as I love my bookstore, any season of the year I love going home at the end of the day, too. Home to books and dog, home to gardens outdoors and cozy reading chair in the house, home to homey projects, such as making jam or chutney or applesauce, or more professional projects, such as editing work.

 

I still consider myself a lucky woman. 

 

Nothing, of course, is the same or ever will be again since the Artist died in spring of 2022, but I often repeat to my dog words the Artist spoke aloud so many times:

 

“We live in a beautiful place!”

 

“It’s a beautiful day – and we’re alive!”

 

Also, I am rich beyond belief in memories.

 

Original Dog Ears Books on Waukazoo St.

Diving Into July

A different day: June image

Without a literal dive, I submerged myself in the silky waters of Lake Michigan for the second time this summer when I took Sunday off to go to the beach with my two younger sisters visiting from Illinois. There was a haze in the air and families clustered in temporary vacation-day encampments on the beach where Bohemian Road (C.R. 669) ends at Good Harbor. Despite all the people, however, there was enough space between groups that the beach didn’t feel crowded. No one was loud, the few dogs with their families were well behaved, and the whole vibe of the day was happy and peaceful. 

 

After time in the water, I stretched out on a beach towel between my sisters, the three of us chatting idly on and off, sometimes entirely quiet. I had left both my dog and my phone at home. So peaceful! 

Beyond the crowds, from my sister's phone...

Every once in a while my mind wanted to zip back to work or ahead to check the calendar, and each time I took a deep breath and told myself, Don’t move. Be here now. I didn’t even have a book with me on the beach (although one of those big umbrellas would make reading on the beach feasible, if someone had more than a couple hours of summer vacation). Later I realized that Sunday's beach interlude was probably the most relaxed I’ve been since Christmas Day 2021 in Dos Cabezas with the Artist and our dog, eating and napping and watching movies all day, just the three of us….

 

With possible rain in Monday's forecast and a morning that began with heavily overcast skies, I decided not to take a second day off. My sisters voiced no objections. They always enjoy exploring in my bookstore, as well as going farther afield in Northport (the Pennington Collection is one of their favorite shopping stops), and this year they had lunch at Around the Corner, bringing me a quinoa burger that I was still enjoying, bite by tasty bite, at noon on Wednesday.

Until we meet again!

It was too bad my sisters had to start back to Illinois Tuesday morning, because that evening was the first of four Tuesday evenings in July at the Willowbrook featuring Michigan authors, a series put together by the Leelanau Township Friends of the Library and named for its initiator, the late Suzanne Rose Kraynak. For this first 2024 event, a presentation in memory of Nancy Giles, I was not only selling books for author Don Lystra but also interviewing him about writing in general and about his new novel, Searching for Van Gogh. We enjoyed our onstage conversation, and the audience seemed to enjoy it, also. I must say I love having other people do all the setup, so different from events in my bookstore, and everyone does a beautiful job at the Willowbrook.

 

These days at my bookstore on Waukazoo Street, I’m gradually digging out from under the latest tsunami of used books to land in my shop and trying not to think about the thousands yet to be moved before summer’s end. It’s only July, after all, so right now my focus is on books already in Northport -- although many terrific new books are coming out, too, these days -- every week, it seems -- and I am eagerly awaiting delivery of more copies of Jim Olson's People of the Dune, so popular I had to back-order when my supply ran out.

Used cookbook section is FULL!

And, surprise! Classic Isaac Asimov paperbacks --

Fiction, poetry,

and books for your outdoor adventures.

At home, with all the rain we’ve had, grass is ready to be mowed again, gardens need weeding and edging, and always there are those pesky, invading autumn olives to be checked and rooted out. Sunny and I will restart our agility sessions with Coach Mike on Monday. I’ve had a couple of new editing jobs, too, so life is busy. It's a good thing that summer days are long.

These raspberries don't pick themselves, either!

"There's just books in there."

 

Catalpa in full bloom

Thirty-one years ago a couple of summer visitors walked by the original Dog Ears on Waukazoo Street (in that long-gone little shed next to long-gone Woody's Settling Inn down the street from our present location), and one of them stuck her head in the door briefly, then reported to her companion before they continued down the sidewalk, "It's just books in there." She might have said, "It's nothing but old books in there," because Dog Ears started with exclusively used volumes. It was at least six years later before I added a few new titles. 

But the warning is apt for today's blog post, as it is an annotated list of books I read in the month of June. To refer to dates for the LTFOL Summer Author Series, see my previous post. I've kept my political opinions on an entirely different blog. This is "just books." #1 here on the June list is #97 in my year-long list (which ended June at #109), but with other things keeping me busy, my reading has slowed down considerably since the beginning of the year, and the next couple of months' lists will no doubt be shorter.

Books Read June 2024

1. Mulloy, Pamela. Off the Tracks: A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel (nonfiction). Having been raised in a railroad family – father a civil engineer for a railroad, grandfather a train-driving engineer, great-uncles who were train conductors – I had a most fortunate childhood, with many memorable train journeys. Those not so fortunate, however, may want to experience armchair train travel, which is what the author did during COVID, remembering and recounting her time on trains.

2. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (nonfiction). How to present this book briefly? That is the challenge! In the United States, our national tendency is to conflate democracy and capitalism under one heading, labeled “freedom,” but Klein demonstrates (in one case after another around the world, as well as in our own country, i.e., in New Orleans), that capitalism and democracy are easily uncoupled, given sufficient force, and that “freedom” for unregulated capitalism generally erodes democratic “freedom,” since what people want (good job, decent housing and health care, etc.) is often at odds with what predatory capitalism wants (smallest costs and highest profits). Big business plays the game all too well. They put the fear of Communism into the population while taking advantage themselves of public funds. In one country aftere another corporations (mostly American) have  dismantled public institutions and safety nets in the name of “freedom.” Think NAFTA. If globalization had really been “inevitable,” why did we have to speed up and rush into it? Death is inevitable, but that’s no reason to commit suicide today.

3. Keen, Andrew. The Internet Is Not the Answer (nonfiction). Rather than “democratizing” the world, the Internet in its privatized and heavily commercialized incarnation has increased and compounded inequality, creating a two-tier world. The worst of it is that, unlike shock-and-awe troops that did so in the wake of disasters and wars (see Klein’s The Shock Doctrine above), Internet inequality is something we have done (and continue to do) to ourselves, albeit without that intention. Falling for the hype, however, we have produced a handful of billionaires and a few bestselling authors and artists, with everyone else working without pay in the trenches, “creating content” (like this blog). I admit I skimmed this book pretty quickly, having just finished Klein’s after two of three weeks of intense concentration. Keen thinks he has the answer and quotes Canadian political theorist Michael Ignatieff: “A question haunting democratic politics everywhere is whether elected governments can control the cyclone of technological change sweeping through their societies.” Keen believes that governments, along with “voluntary, market-led solutions” can control the sweeping changes. I have my doubts, especially when we see that so many members of the United States Congress and the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court are in bed with the corporate billionaires. And how much of government has already been outsourced to corporations? (See again Klein, above.) P.S. This book would be better with an index.

4. Laing, Olivia. The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (nonfiction). I would not say the author explores “the link” between creativity and alcohol (not all creative people are alcoholics) as much as she explores the role of alcohol in the lives of half a dozen well-known American writers also known well for their alcoholism: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. Laing says she will never abandon ‘hybrid’ writing for strict genre work, and The Trip to Echo Spring typifies her preference as it combines travel and personal memoir with biography and investigation of a social and medical problem. That worked for me. I might not have wanted to read book-length biographies of all the writers she includes or a memoir of her alcoholic family, and I was amused to read (after finishing the book myself) some reader responses from people who didn’t like one or another aspect and wish she told a narrower story. No, I liked the way she did it. I loved the train travel and the places she visited, found the writers’ lives and relationships fascinating (if often horribly depressing), and I was grateful for notes on recent social research and physiological findings about how people become addicted to alcohol and why the addiction is so hard to escape, with clues here and there that explained what had been mystifying behavior of alcohol-dependent people in my own life.

5. Dennis, Jerry. A Place on the Water: An Angler’s Reflections on Home (nonfiction). I did not put this book aside to read Pamela Mulloy’s and Olivia Laing’s books because Jerry Dennis failed to enchant me but because I was so thoroughly enchanted that I was in no hurry to reach the end of the book. When Hemingway couldn’t sleep, he reviewed actual fishing experiences and imagined others. When I wake in the middle of the night, I reach for a book. A Place on the Water is a book that puts me right there, midstream. Very comforting.

6. Buck, Pearl. All Under Heaven (fiction). In the author’s epilogue, she writes that this novel was put away unfinished for a long time, until she felt ready to complete and publish it. To me, it still feels unfinished -- undoubtedly because events were still in process, but between the Chinese revolution and the novel’s publication in the 1970s came the McCarthy era in the U.S., and while the story of former diplomat Malcolm MacNeil and his Russian-born wife and their family establishing themselves in the eastern United States following Malcolm’s return from 20 years in China (America a first-time experience for his wife and children), what seems like foreshadowing in the story is never developed, and Malcolm seems not to have come to any conclusions by the last page of the book. The backgrounds of the family members and their responses to their new home are interesting, but when the novel comes to an end it feels as if we have left the characters at the story’s midpoint.

7. Hamilton, Steve. The Lock Artist (fiction). I wasn’t sure how I felt about this for the first few pages but kept going and became engrossed. Very likable young protagonist gets himself into a helluva mess! Not set in the U.P. (as are his Woods Cop novels) but definitely an attention-grabber.

8. Samuels, Robert and Toluse Olorunnipa. His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice (nonfiction). You’ve heard his name. You know how he died. This book tells you how he lived. It’s one thing to read statistics about rates of arrests and incarceration for Black men and/or about how many Black families live in poverty, even to read a history of slavery and subsequent Jim Crow laws in the South. It’s quite another thing to follow generations of a family from slavery to the present and then to follow one individual from birth to death – and then to follow his family’s experiences after he died. He didn’t want to be another picture of a dead Black man on a t-shirt. He had dreams and struggles and family and friends he loved. A reader feels his presence on the page and wishes to have known him in person. His name: George Floyd. Read this book.

9. Portis, Charles. True Grit (fiction). I read this novel because Bonnie Jo Campbell said it had been one of her inspirations for The Waters. It seems many people who have discovered it take it to heart and read it over and over, but I probably won’t re-read it myself, though it was interesting. Part of the interest was in the fact that it was written and published in the middle of the 20^th century but feels like something much earlier, around the time of the novel’s setting.

10.             Franqui, Leah. Mother Land (fiction). Jake at the library in Leland got this one for me through interlibrary loan. I’d read America for Beginners and wanted to try something else by the same author. In Mother Land, an American woman who has moved to Mumbai with her Indian husband is surprised by a “visit” from her new mother-in-law, who announces that she has left her husband and is moving in with son and wife. Wife is dismayed. Mother-in-law begins to take over running of household. Son departs on a month-long business trip that stretches out beyond the month. The novel goes back and forth between the two main women characters (both in third person), which was interesting to me, but very little actually happens until, near the end, things seem to happen in a big rush. I know friends who would not persevere to that end, bored by earlier lack of action. I probably won’t re-read this book, either, but the inner lives of the two women and their struggles to find themselves kept me reading.

11.             Bythell, Shaun. Confessions of a Bookseller (nonfiction). I had a busy week. On Monday I made a deal to buy 7,000 used and rare books, the entire contents of another bookseller’s shop, inventory his widow needed to liquidate. She made me a good price. But moving 7,000 books is no picnic, and I told her I had too much going on in June and July to clear everything out until the beginning of August. She was very understanding. Still, with the help of her daughter and son-in-law we managed to pack up and transfer three carloads of books from Leland to Northport, leaving me depleted end of day and with no energy to dive into the challenge of a new book. Instead, rereading Shaun’s diary of a year in his bookstore in Scotland – stretching his year out over a full week of my bedtimes – was the perfect solution. 

12.             Kellogg, Richard. Wall of Silver: A Treasure Hunter’s Dream (fiction? nonfiction?). My neighbor (who printed this book for the author) loaned me Wall of Silver. The author swore it was a true story. Who knows? It reads like an exciting and suspenseful adventure tale, though the author is never able to return to the mine to claim the treasured silver he says was there.

13.             Caldwell, Erskine. Some American People (nonfiction). Known for his fiction, Caldwell undertook cross-country travel during the Depression to talk to Americans in all walks of life but particularly the poor, unemployed, and marginally and vulnerably employed. This picture of the Depression is as grim as any you’ll read and certainly bleaker than what we read in school history books. Back before there were strong unions and would-be workers were desperate, Detroit’s auto industry comes off as a nightmare, but there are also migrants from all over the Great Plains (not only Oklahoma), moving west in hopes of finding fertile soil to farm and rain to water it. Starving, malnourished babies; men “riding the rails”; girls and women turning to prostitution; and countless families broken by a broken economy. And yet—I doubted the first quotation so checked that Henry really said it and found the citation—Ford claimed in 1934 that "The Depression was just a state of mind. It is over for everyone who has changed his state of mind" (Ford News, back cover, April 1934). He also opined that "Man minus the Machine is a slave; Man plus the Machine is a freeman" (Ford News, p. 2, 8/1/1925). Workers who spoke to Caldwell had a different view of machines, particularly when “the line” was speeded up, workforce simultaneously reduced, and safety devices removed to avoid slowing production. It was labor unions that made auto factory work the bedrock of Detroit’s mid-20^th century new middle class. In the 1930s, fulltime work was hard to come by and easy to lose. And then the poor sharecroppers in Georgia! Be glad you are living now, friends!