"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!