Bedtime Books

Iris time

 

May and June are when those of us who make our living chiefly thanks to summer tourism are gearing up for July and August, and at the same time we are busy at home – outdoors, that is – mowing grass and putting in and tending gardens, because this is the time it must be done. I can put off painting a hallway but cannot put off planting my summer garden.

Not looking like much so far,

but I hope there will be a lot to see a month from now.

So for me right now it’s gardening and errands in the morning, bookstore during the day, more gardening and mowing grass in the evening, dog work and play morning and evening – and who has time (or inclination) for housework? Come the end of the day, it's time to collapse into bed with a book. 

Morning: between errands

 

During the day in my bookstore, between customers, I’ve been reading a couple of very unsettling books. One by Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, contains much that I knew in vague outline but with nightmare details and repetitions and seemingly endless repercussions throughout the world, all so infuriating that I can only read a few pages at a time before I need to set the book aside to protect my blood pressure. The other is Diane Foley’s story, told by Colum McCann and titled American Mother. Seven years after her journalist son, Jim Foley, was kidnapped, held, tortured, and finally beheaded by ISIS, his mother had an opportunity to meet with and have conversations with one of the men convicted of Jim’s murder. (Reading The Shock Doctrine has influenced the way I read or hear any world news, and it had affects how I’m reading American Mother, too.) Both Klein’s and Foley/McCann’s are important books for anyone who cares what the U.S. does in the name of American citizens; I don’t think I need to explain, though, why I do not consider them “bedtime books” and why I wouldn’t want to read either of them right before falling asleep.

 

So last night I opened A Place on the Water: An Angler’s Reflections on Home, by Jerry Dennis, a copy signed by both Dennis and his illustrator, the wonderful Glenn Wolff, a copy I had given the Artist (a.k.a. the River Rat) for Christmas in 1993. Do not trust Publisher’s Weekly when they say that “home” for Jerry Dennis is the Upper Peninsula. It is not. Dennis grew up in the greater Traverse City region. Take Macmillan’s word for it, however, that this book published under their St. Martin’s Press imprint is “a passionate and eloquent exploration" of the natural world. It had been years since I’d read it, but the first page satisfied me that I had chosen the perfect bedtime book after a long evening of mowing and dog play.

"Can we go outside again? It isn't dark yet!"

This morning, reflecting with satisfaction on my reading of the night before, I thought about different categories of what I consider bedtime books. There are light or genre fiction novels (genre conventions can be soothing, even with dead bodies, as long as the story doesn’t get too graphic); books of serious literature so familiar to the reader that they can be opened anywhere and re-read over and over (Jane Austen; James Joyce's Ulysses; Thoreau; Proust); memoirs and travel books (other people’s lives and explorations); and, for me, essays, that last group often overlapping with the second, as with A Place on the Water.

 

How do you feel about essays, or are you put off by the name of the category? If you haven’t fallen in love with them already, try a few. Here are a few wholehearted recommendations from yours truly: 

 

High Tide in Tucson, by Barbara Kingsolver (Arizona)

Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment, by Renata Golden (Arizona)

Anything by Adam Gopnik (New York; Paris)

Anything by Kathleen Stocking (Michigan and beyond)

Anything by Jerry Dennis (Michigan)

Anything by Fleda Brown (Michigan)

Flesh and Stones: Field Notes from a Finite World and Slow Learner: Essays, by Jan Shoemaker (Michigan)

 

That’s only a starter. Maybe some of you have suggestions?

Roadside splash of color