May: One for the Books

Ground painted with sweeps of hawkweed --

May disappeared much too fast, as my "Books Read 2024" continued from #79 through #96. One book I re-read for the umpteenth time (The Haunted Bookshop), several were very short, and The Past Recaptured I re-read off and on starting in the beginning of the winter, only reaching the last page, finally -- reluctantly! -- a few days ago. If I had to select only one book to recommend from my May reading list, it would have to be Committing Journalism (comment following the title in the list will tell you why), but there are other worthwhile books here, also, so take a look and see if anything moves you.

 

Images today are from a drive I took (with Sunny) on Sunday down through Benzie County and over the border into Manistee County, soaking up the scenery.

Not in Europe, so, not a castle in ruins....

Morley, Christopher. The Haunted Bookshop (fiction). See this post for details.

 

Banks, Russell. Foregone (fiction). A famous Canadian documentary filmmaker is dying and wants to talk honestly about his early life, on film, for the first time. He feels he owes that honesty to his wife but can only lie to her unless a camera is there as witness. Fife (the man’s name) drifts between past and present, attended by his wife, his nurse, and the film crew headed by one of his former students. At the end I found myself if he had imagined all of it as he died. You tell me.

 

Lahey, Anita. The Last Goldfish: A True Tale of Friendship (nonfiction). What makes a friendship special when you’re young, and what makes it last? How do you stand by your best friend from 9^th grade to age 22 when you realize she really is dying? How do you balance honesty with positivity? And when she’s gone, how do you go on without her?

 

Malamud, Bernard. Dubin’s Lives (fiction). The protagonist is a biographer and often referred to as “the biographer” rather than by name. Does he investigate the lives of others rather than living his own? Harsh focus on marriage (separate from “love”), but most disappointing to me was the lack of anything that might be called a climax or an epiphany. I’ve complained before about novelists who slam the door after their novel’s climax, giving us no denouement, but in this novel Malamud jumps straight from a meandering story line to a brief dénouement, leaving a tangle of unsatisfying loose ends.

 

Brodsky, Joseph. Watermark (nonfiction). A slender volume that is not exactly essays or memoir but certainly not a novel, Watermark defies classification. That a poet would write poetic prose is no surprise, and the sentences are beautiful; however, I advise not trying to make sense of every subject-verb statement. Better simply to let yourself drift sybaritically in Brodsky’s impressions of Venice, rocked by its watery waves.

 

Toews, Miriam. All My Puny Sorrows (fiction). I laughed out loud several times while reading the first chapter of this Canadian novel of two Mennonite sisters. Sisters in the backseat of the car, parents up front, long trip: a recipe for hilarity. Then a suicide attempt by the older sister, now a concert pianist, in the second chapter. Not so funny. But I stuck with it and am glad I did – not just for the laughs that reprised in the last few pages, either. “Life is a strange old ‘possum,” as someone I used to know used to say. But there’s also love.

 

McGarey, Gladys, M.D. (nonfiction). The Well-Lived Life: A 102-Year-Old Doctor’s Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age (nonfiction). A good friend recently widowed insisted that I borrow and read this book, and now I am thinking of so many friends with whom I would also like to share it. A centenarian and medical doctor, Dr. McGarey spent much of her childhood in India with her parents and siblings. Herself the mother of six children, divorced (not her decision) after almost 50 years of marriage, she is someone with a lot of life experience, and she has distilled for us young 'uns what she has learned along the way. Someone whose advice is worth heeding.

 

Goodman, Allegra. The Family Markowitz (fiction). I always enjoy Goodman’s fiction, and this early novel of hers was no exception. The family dynamics and characters’ shifting emotional responses are completely familiar. Sarah is nurturing matriarch, easing the way for her husband and mother-in-law, as well as the younger generations, but the author shifts seamlessly from one character’s inner self to another’s. Masterful.

Arikawa, Hiro. The Travelling Cat Chronicles (fiction). A small novel in size of book and length of story (the cover is beautiful), largely not exclusively narrated by the cat, did not thoroughly overcome my resistance to its cuteness. Was it too cute? I was not won over, though I had hoped to be. 

 

Bennett, Alan. The Uncommon Reader (fiction). Absolutely charming! Late in life, the Queen of England takes up reading, much to the alarm of her staff and almost everyone else. Then she goes a step further and announces that she is going to write a book! Could anyone read this tiny book (not much over 100 pages) without laughing out loud? I could not. 

 

Berry, Wendell. Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer (nonfiction). If I were to write something like this, it would be WIANGTB a Dishwasher or …a Garbage Disposal or …a Self-Propelled Lawnmower or a Computerized Cash Register for My Business or Central (Or Any Other Kind of) Air Conditioning for My Home. But I do have a laptop computer, and I am keeping this list on it and writing my blog posts with it, so there you are, but I love his arguments and would never argue against his conclusion.

Closed! That made me sad.

Martin, Dannie M. & Peter Y. Sussman. Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog (nonfiction). If you are an American taxpayer, you should read this book. What kind of punishments do you feel are deserved, and what do you think our prisons accomplish? How much do you know about what we call the justice system, and how much do you know about incarceration? Opinions without information are worse than no opinions at all.

Arcadia Marsh -- a watery wonderland!

Wodehouse, P. G. Jeeves (fiction). One night I needed a silly, trivial, pointless book, and Jeeves fit the bill.

 

de Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine. The Princess of Clèves (fiction). Persevering through the confusing and tedious opening pages, at last I reached the story proper and read through to the end of this period classic of French literature. There! That’s done! I must admit it was, though somewhat turgid, suspenseful and the end surprising, and I’m glad I read it, although it’s not something I expect to re-read.

Always impressive Lake Michigan view

Hughes, Dorothy B. In a Lonely Place (fiction). From classic French to classic noir was quite a transition. The suspense in this novel is not in whodunit but in how long he will escape detection and how he will finally meet his end. Perhaps unfairly, I read it as another reason to say “No, thank you” to California. (Very subjective response, I realize.)

 

Proust, Marcel. The Past Recaptured (fiction). This re-reading spread itself out over many, many weeks, as I turned to Proust again and again between other bedtime books. “Eternal existence is not promised to books any more than to men,” he wrote, and yet the life of Proust’s epic work seems only to gain vitality as years go by. I used to say (thinking myself witty) that life was “too short to read Proust.” Later I realized that it too short not to read him.

 

Tey, Josephine. A Daughter of Time (fiction). Apprehensive when I saw family trees preceding the story, I was relieved, surprised, and delighted to find that the story itself was neither a modern nor a historical fictional murder mystery but research into history by a couple of fictional characters thrown together when one is sent to cheer the other in his hospital bed. Did Richard III of England have two nephews murdered? Was he truly a monster so often depicted? Fascinating.

 

McCann, Colum with Diane Foley. American Mother (nonfiction). What would you expect if a member of your family was taken hostage by terrorists? Government assistance? Rescue? Ongoing updates? Diane Foley got little if any of this, but her son’s gruesome death did not stop her from working to make the future better for others. She even met with one of her son’s kidnappers, presumably also one of his torturers. A remarkable woman.

Quiet interior corner of Platte Township pleased me.

If you’ve read my two previous posts, you already know that I’m currently reading both Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (daytime) and Jerry Dennis’s A Place on the Water (bedtime), two nonfiction books that could hardly have less in common. Their commonality for me will be their presence, weeks from now, on my June list. Please, don’t let June speed by too fast! – Oh, but Bonnie Jo Campbell is coming to the bookstore on Saturday, June 22, so if Time does fly (as I'm only too sure it will), it will seem all the sooner that Bonnie arrives. And there you have another example of my philosophy of life in a nutshell: Everything is a double-edged sword. 

As I wended (yes!) my way south to make a circuit around Arcadia Marsh and then turn back north and head for home, I was somewhat dismayed at how up-to-date and full of people all the lakeside towns and beaches already were (the first weekend after busy Memorial Day) and how “fancy” so many new businesses seem to be. Even signage for parks and lookouts seemed excessive. Is it just me? Is it just being old? (Probably yes and yes would be the answers there.) It made me sad to see the Big Apple abandoned and derelict, as I remembered the last time the Artist and I stopped there for burgers and beer (the Big Apple opened in 1937, the year the Artist was born), while the ruins of an old building in Elberta seemed nothing short of charming. That sounds inconsistent, but it's the erasure of memories that troubles me. More about that another time.

Away from lakeshores, things are quieter, and I feel more at home. There are still unpaved roads, almost free of traffic -- though I noticed along the edges of one of my favorite back roads here in Leelanau those little orange flags telling me that fiber optic cable for Internet access had been laid down there, too. Is the expectation that this road will eventually be lined with houses? Heaven forbid!

Please do not disturb the shadows!