Look Near, Look Far

That green pointillist flush I love!

Season’s Progress

Orchard buds on 5 May 2026

Cherry blossoms in the orchard around my house have yet to appear (still in bud), though young orchard trees out on Stony Point, on the bay side of the peninsula, were in blossom for Mothers Day, and the big black cherry trees (a forest hardwood) are blooming, too. The season is advancing, albeit by fits and starts, with overnight temperatures below freezing.  I harvested enough fiddlehead ferns to accompany two meals last week. 

Black cherry at the edge of the woods

Looking up through its crown

Blossom cluster

In Traverse City, the decorative pear trees are radiant in the sunshine. Is there a danger, though, in having planted the city streets with so many of one tree variety? What if a pest were to strike that landscaped monoculture? I looked online for an answer and discovered an even more alarming possibility: This variety of ornamental pear is now considered invasive because, while sterile itself, it can cross-fertilize with other varieties and produce thorns monstrous enough to puncture tractor tires! It also has hazardous weaknesses due to its branching habit, and some states have already outlawed their sale. Don't plant them in your yard! 

Look beyond looks!

If Traverse City follows other cities in eliminating this tree (which seems like a good plan), I hope they will do it on a gradual basis and replace the pears with two or three different kinds of trees, maybe redbud and dogwood and something else. Suggestions? 

Changing the subject: Isn't my hellebore beautiful?

What Makes a Good Book Review or Reviewer?

I hate to say it, but I can’t help concluding, after reading a raft of online amateur book reviews (I am tempted to put “reviews” in scare quotes, like so), that there are a lot of very lazy readers in our country who should not be claiming to be reviewers. Or maybe they are simply reading books that are not right for them. After I finished reading what struck me as a brilliant first novel, curious to see what others had thought about it, I looked for reviews, and three particular criticisms that I discounted as inappropriate stood out, each made by more than one person. I have condensed to give composite comments, so the following are not quoted directly: 

(1) There are too many new novels set in World War II. Here's another one. Yawn!

(2) If you don’t know Paris, you’ll be lost in this book. It's probably okay for people who know Paris, but for me? Yawn! 

(3) The action and time jumped around in a confusing way. I'm outta here!

Here is my first round of responses:

(1) Are there too many boy-meets-girl novels? Too many novels about American family life? The question isn’t the number of novels available on any given subject, but their quality and how worthy they are of readers’ time. 

(2) I know Paris pretty well, but I’ve never visited Salinas or San Francisco or Brooklyn, let alone Moscow or Mumbai or anywhere on the African or Asian or South American continent. I’ve never anywhere near Australia. And yet I have read avidly novels set in all these locales, as well as stories set in earlier centuries in America and Europe (despite my inability to travel through time except in imagination and, therefore, in books). For those of us without the means to afford constant world travel, books give us wings! In fact, I learned Paris from books long before I ever set foot in its streets, just as I recognized my first sandhill crane from having seen it pictured in bird field guides. 

(3) Fiction with multiple narrators and nonsequential time sequences has become a norm in Western fiction, from YA titles to the most abstruse literary works. At times it is confusing, and when I’m reading a book written that way it often takes me 20 or 30 pages to get into the rhythm, but seldom does the difficulty persist, and in the case of this particular novel italics that set off the ghost character's viewpoint help a lot.

And here is round 2: 

(4) If you’re tired of WWII novels or only want to read books set in geography you know well, don’t read such books! Skip them entirely, or if you find one in your hands and can’t get into it, at least don’t foist your dismissive opinion off as a “review.” If you don’t want to travel, stay home rather than go to another country and complain because it isn't like home.

(5) There is nothing wrong with preferring a simple, linear, chronological narrative, either, but readers don’t need opinions on novels structured otherwise by people who object to alternative structures. You can find plenty of books written with your preferences in mind. There is fiction for every taste. Read with your preferences in mind and review those books. You will find some successful and others disappointing, and that’s as it should be. 

(6) We all have limitations. I would not presume to review books of fantasy or science fiction, because those are genres that don’t speak to me. They never have. I get bored, and my mind wanders. People who love sci-fi and fantasy and have a strong reading background in the field apply quality standards to their reviews that I could never hope to achieve. So I’m not dissing anyone for their reading choices. All I’m saying is I don’t see the point in someone purporting to review a book she couldn’t begin appreciate and, in many cases, didn’t even finish.

Okay, that’s my opinion as a reader, bookseller, and occasional book reviewer. I don’t expect it to change a single mind or alter anyone’s practice—people will keep doing what they want to do—but I wanted to put it out there. Agree—or disagree?

I highly recommend this brilliant first novel!

You may have read other novels set in Paris during World War II, but no two are alike, and this one (as does Karen Mulvahill's The Lost Woman) shows how very particular chance events in one era continue to reverberate and affect individuals and families in following years. Also, the prose is enchanting! 

Don't miss the cowslips. They are blooming now.

Really, Really Here

Cinco de Mayo in the cherry orchard

The Most Beautiful, Most Uncertain Month of the Year?

May has arrived, right on time, and never have I watched the buds of fruit trees as closely as I’m watching them this year. My interest is personal, social, and community-minded. 

My two little apple trees, after several years of bountiful harvest, succumbed to codling moths in 2024 and a late freeze in 2025. I’ve taken proactive measures against the codling moths but can do nothing about the weather. That’s personal. Fingers crossed!

Will there be apples this year?

The social aspect of my interest has to do with friends and neighbors who want to get together when the orchard is in bloom. When will that be? they ask. Twenty days from Stage 2, an online guru says, and yet what looks like Stage 2 to me seems as if it’s been going on for a week already. Please tell me the buds have not been killed by cold overnight temperatures, as so many were last year!

As for community, in a farming neighborhood such as mine it matters to most of us that our farmer neighbors have good harvests. Few of us are invested financially, but we want their success. 

Of course, you know I’ve been keeping track of wildflowers in the woods, too. For such a long time, it seemed that Dutchman’s breeches were the only ephemerals daring to bloom. Spring beauties, usually the season’s first, had popped above the forest litter but were hesitant to open their faces to grey skies and cold winds. (I had similar feelings.) Trillium, like the spring beauties, kept their flowers shut up tight, waiting. Then finally I spotted a bellwort, one of my favorite spring flowers with its shy, gracefully drooping habit, and two days later, after warmer temperatures and sunshine, there were crowds of trillium and bellwort, along with bracken fern fiddleheads, and spring seemed truly to have arrived at last. One day, a single trout lily, a.k.a. dogtooth violet! 

Defense of John Steinbeck

Everyone, it seems, wants to “reassess” the last published book of John Steinbeck’s career, his bestseller Travels with Charley: In Search of America. I'll begin with the AI overview served up by Google, because it's the first thing most people will see when they do an online search: 

Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962) is not a strictly true story and is considered a heavily fabricated or "fictionalized" non-fiction book. While John Steinbeck did take a road trip with his dog in 1960, he created fake characters, invented conversations, and falsified where he slept.

Other critics are more specific, sniffing haughtily that he may have driven a truck with a camper but that he stayed in motor courts. Well, sometimes he did, and he says so right in the book, at least three times that I recall without looking for citations. Or that it wasn’t a completely solo trip, as his wife met him on more than one occasion, times together in Chicago and with her relatives in Texas that he also recounted in the book itself. Did these critics read Steinbeck's book at all? 

A more general criticism (see above) is that he invented characters and conversations. I wonder how they would know. Right at the outset he said that he was not a note-taker. And Travels with Charley was not a diary, after all, not a day-by-day, hour-by-hour account. That the author came to no very definite conclusions is something else he admitted himself, more than once. He could not distill the United States down to a single personality with universal coast-to-coast characteristics. I should hope not! 

I wonder what Steinbeck would think if he could take his cross-country trip again in 2026. He wrote this of the Monterey Peninsula, a place he had known well in earlier years:

…The beaches are clean where once they festered with fish guts and flies. The canneries which once put up a sickening stench are gone, their places filled with restaurants, antique shops, and the like. They fish for tourists now, not pilchards, and that species they are not likely to wipe out. And Carmel, begun by starveling writers and unwanted painters, is now a community of the well-to-do and the retired. If Carmel’s founders should return, they could not afford to live there….

The place of my origin had changed, and having gone away I had not changed with it. In my memory it stood as it once did and its outward appearance confused and angered me.

- John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

That was in 1960, when the population explosion he saw, staggering as it seemed at the time, in retrospect has nothing on today’s California crowded and expensive real estate.

I was disappointed that Steinbeck hurried through Arizona in a single paragraph, but it was his trip, not mine, and he admitted he was tired of traveling by then and headed for the barn, planning immersions only in Texas and the South farther east, focusing on New Orleans. That South in his time was the South of early forced desegregation, angry, bullying local crowds, and what he calls “the breath of fear” everywhere. No wonder he felt his trip was over by the time he reached Abingdon, Virginia. 

As for fabrications, however, according to Steinbeck,

Up to Abingdon, Virginia, I can reel back the trip like film. I have almost total recall, every face is there, every hill and tree and color, and sound of speech and small scenes ready to replay themselves in my memory.

Well, then, are some of the people in this book fictional characters? I am willing to accept that the author may have presented composites and that his “almost total recall” would not have been word-for-word of every conversation, but I’m also willing to believe that his trip was basically the trip he recounts in his book. He could have invented more dramatic scenes and more outrageous characters, had he wanted to do so. He was, after all, John Steinbeck.

The Girl Who Doesn't Read

Every morning's companion

Not fair to say that of Sunny Juliet, is it? She reads me pretty well, and I don't do too badly reading her, either. We were happy to see her dog friends two days in a row on Sunday and Monday, and we're happy every day to spend time out in our yard at home and in the meadow and in the woods. 

Reading her dog momma's face

Bookstore Schedule for May

In general, hours for May will be Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; however, the shop will be closed Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, May 19, 20, 21 while I’m out of town, then open again Friday and Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. 

Memorial Day! At last or already? How do you feel about it? Are you ready?

We are happy to be into porch season at last.