Arrivals and Departures (because I couldn’t think of any appropriate title)

My constant companion, here all along!

 

Fall Hours? Don’t Ask!

 

I thought I had fall bookshop hours figured out, but now I just don’t know. I’ll be here Tuesdays through Saturdays whenever I can get here, until 4 p.m. if possible, but you might want to call first if you’re making a long drive solely to visit Dog Ears Books. So let's say,

Tuesday, 11-3

Wednesday-Friday, 11-4

Saturday, 11-5

CIRCUMSTANCES PERMITTING!

And truly, if we're being honest with ourselves, isn't this all we can ever say about where we'll be at any particular time? “CIRCUMSTANCES PERMITTING!”?

 

 

My Recent Reading

 

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a “Books Read” list, so I’ll do that in the near future, someday soon when it’s time to get something new here on the blog and other inspiration fails. Back early in the summer, overwhelmed by a number of aspects of life in our 21st century world, I binged a private detective series, The Sanibel Island Detective, by Ron Base. More recently, looking for a multibook getaway, I took home the Rabbi Small books that had been sitting on my mystery shelf for far too long, waiting to be discovered—not that I hadn’t mentioned those Harry Kemelman titles to browsers, adding that they were some of my favorites, but no one took up the recommendation. Fine! I re-read all four books with pleasure!

Having loved This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams, I’m now reading another novel set in the same rainy Irish village, The Year of the Child. Our Leelanau weather this post-Labor Day week is appropriate to reading of life in Faha: wild and woolly, windy and wet. I would find it difficult to live in such a consistently rainy part of the world, but I love the slow, loving, detailed descriptions Williams gives of his characters and their homes and relationships and interactions. 

 

Readers looking for fast-paced action need to look elsewhere than in the pages of Niall Williams’s novels. His belong to a category I call “slow books,” the kind you sink into and wrap yourself up in, coming to view his characters as old friends. Also, if you are an impressionable kind of reader, you’ll want to have plenty of tea on hand (in the village of Faha they brew it dark and strong), although I’ve been making do with hot cocoa these chilly, windy, rainy September evenings.

Wet, windy, wild and woolly September!

(And yes, here in my bookshop, customers must bear with my listening, once again, to Rosanne and Johnny Cash singing “September When It Comes,” a haunting song that moves me almost to tears. And yes, I have linked it in previous years.)

 

 

My Suspicious Mind

 

We all have our suspicions, don’t we? Especially when it comes to the thinking of those with whom we disagree. Some proponents of gun rights have actually claimed, publicly, that liberals are happy when there is another school shooting incident, because they see it as strengthening the argument for stricter gun control! How could anyone believe and say such an outrageous thing, that anyone could be happy to have schoolchildren terrorized and killed? And yet, people who say they love “freedom” so much have said such vile things against proponents of stricter gun control. I would search for an example to provide here but would rather keep my blood pressure in a safe range.

 

The NRA claims that “gun control doesn’t work” (and when you've read that article, you’ll want to read about the NRA and guns in Ryan Busse’s book Gunfight: My Battle against the Industry that Radicalized America), but clearly they are using a different set of data than that cited by the editors of Scientific American, who say “The science is clear: Gun control saves lives.” I won’t give a long list of links here, but do a search yourself for “gun control arguments” and see what turns up. 

 

The gun issue, though, is tangential to my most recent suspicion, so I’ll leave you to make a connection if you see one. What I’m thinking these days is another school issue--the state of Florida’s plan to end mandatory vaccinations. I won’t comment on the ridiculous parallel between mandatory vaccination and slavery! I mean, really, people! What does strike me is the likelihood that more families may decide to keep their children out of public schools for fear of infectious diseases, and if that happens, shrinking enrollment would shrink school faculty and support staff and possibly close some schools—and isn’t that just what the privatize-everything people would love to see happen? Another thought: those who count on creating an ignorant electorate would be overjoyed to see American public education destroyed!

 

My Parallel Lives

How many lives do each of us live at one time, and how many of them do we share with others? 

 

I have, obviously, what you might call my mundane life—the everyday, ordinary, recurring circle of days that each of us has. Much, though not all, of my mundane life is public, since I am not retired but still work in my retail bookshop for a living, and so I go most days to that bookshop in the village of Northport, Michigan, where I regularly meet year-round locals, seasonal residents, visitors from other parts of Michigan, and travelers far from home. I also meet authors of books, some established and some just starting out, and that's always interesting. And then there are also the insatiably curious. For instance, I am often asked, “Where do you get all your books?” and I tell people the truth. “They come to me.” After 32 years in business, people know I am here, and they think of me when  pruning their home libraries and/or rehoming inherited volumes. 

Clean and desirable, worthy of shelf space

My place of business is also a place of personal friendships and meaningful conversations, and it includes too the frequent indulgence of a latte from the New Bohemian Café, as well as walks to the post office, library, bank, and grocery store, and so in all these ways, although I have lost my beloved life partner and although I work in a small village, I am far from isolated, and in that I am most fortunate.

But then I have, as do we all, a less public mundane life in which I maintain my home and land, work and play with my dog, and face the challenges of widowhood and aging, along with all manner of smaller challenges that come with the materiality and machinery of existence, but in this, too, other people come in and out of the scene, thank heaven! I text daily with sisters and friends, put notes and letters in the mail and rejoice to find notes and letters in my own post office box, occasionally share a meal with someone, and generally draw comfort from my little circle as we trade recipes and laughter and stories of our small personal worries and triumphs along with larger, global concerns, serve as listeners or advisors to each other when needed, and in general bolster one another’s morale. “O, who would inhabit this bleak world alone?” 

 

Living, we spin webs of connection.

In my less public mundane life I follow gruesome political news, write letters, and take my small stands with like-minded others. And so the life of the mind, as it is often called, obviously overlaps the mundane, or at least it does for me. Political (as well as literary) concerns are essential to my work and to most of my relationships, and yet these are also part of my private, solitary life, the life I wake to in the dark. It may seem paradoxical to call political concerns private rather than public—and as I say, the private and public do overlap in the life of the mind—but those middle-of-the-night wakings, when I remember once more, all over again, with a shock, that the nightmare of American political life is reality, not merely a bad dream, then although I know I am far from alone in such awakenings to dread, I feel most alone. What do others do? What I do is reach for a book. Because what else can I do in the middle of the night except try to calm my soul and return to sleep?

I remember all too well the night of September 11-12, 2001. The Artist and I lay awake in the dark, listening to the radio, taking what comfort we could in each other's presence as our minds wrestled to understand what had happened and worried about what would follow. Then sometime in the dark of morning, long before sunrise, he got up and began moving about. “What are you doing?" I asked. “Packing,” he said. “I think we should go to Grand Marais.” It was what we had planned to do on September 12, but the events of the 11th had left us shaken and unsure. 

That was the first time I ever crossed the Straits of Mackinac without my heart lifting, but we took up residence in Room 11 of the old lumberjack hotel and a day or two later joined the community in a memorial service in the tiny little Lutheran church, and it felt right to be there. Together.

 

The name of the rose continues to signify.

Now in sleep occurs my most private, most solitary life, the unsharable life of dreams. In the best of them I am reunited with the love of my life, and then it matters not what we are “doing” in any dream sequence, because whatever we are doing or talking about, whoever else might be in the scene, wherever it takes place, what matters is that we are together again, I see him again, talk to him, hear his voice, and I wake very reluctantly from the most ordinary dream scenes to a world from which the Artist has departed.

 

Obviously, all these strands I have called “parallel” are not separate (and so not really parallel at all) but braided together, some strands visible to others, friends or strangers, some shared only with those closest to me, and the dreams my purely private life that no one else living can share.

 

My Home Comforts

 

Ambition in the kitchen has taken a back seat in the September slow-down. Although I still have berries in the freezer, so eventually more jam must be made, there is no urgency, and I didn’t buy a large enough quantity of peaches to warrant canning, only enough to enjoy with yogurt and blueberries and then, with the last few, in a small rustic fresh peach tart. So there we were on the porch again, I with my peach tart and hot cocoa and Niall Williams novel, Sunny Juliet with a fresh beef bone, rain beating a tattoo on the metal roof. I must say, life was pretty cozy at home that evening, despite raging insanity in the world at large. Whatever comes in the future of my small life or the large, crazy world, I am right now a lucky woman.

Seek Comfort and Welcome Joy

Pure joy!!!

Some of you have no doubt realized already that many of my recent topics up to and including this one—courage, loving care, strength, comfort and joy—are not really separate or separable. True it is! Just as our desires are multifaceted and complex, not singular and “pure,” so it is with our emotions. Still, focusing on one aspect at a time can be helpful, and while comfort and joy are important parts of loving care and strength and courage, I want to focus in on the former pair today, because it’s all too easy, when we’re trying to be strong and brave and take care of ourselves and others, to narrow our gaze to difficulty, to all the challenges we face, and lose track of the importance of experiencing—letting in—ongoing comfort and joy. 

 

Joy helps reduce stress in your everyday life, and that’s a good thing, but if stress reduction is all we consider about it, we are selling joy short, judging it good because it’s useful to us, good for us, rather than inviting joy into our lives because we’re alive and because the world is basically beautiful and we are made, I truly believe, for beauty and for joy. 

 

Many people I know are grandparents, the fortunate ones able to interact with grandchildren on a daily basis. “The light of my life,” one grandfather told me of a young grandson, while another friend describes her new granddaughter (quite rightly! I’ve seen pictures!) as irresistible. Others of us, living miles from family, find comfort and joy in friendship, our companion animals, and in the beauty of nature. 

She gets me outdoors!

Spring and summer WILL return!

Music, whether playing it or simply listening to it, is important—and not only Beethoven. Klezmer music, despite the minor key, is joyful, and country music can be. Do you hear the blues as music of a sad sad, downtrodden people? Not if you are playing or singing it yourself or if you read the interpretation of Albert Murray. When the spirit lifts and lungs take in larger breaths, smiles wreath our faces, and laughter bubbles over—joyful responses!

 

Here is a site I found with “joyful literature for dark times.” I’ve read a few of the books listed on that site but have my own favorites, as I’m sure you must, as well. Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books is a series I find both comforting and joyful. Mma Ramotswe is such a kind, thoughtful person, and she loves her country of Botswana so much! 

I love these books.

Do you have a favorite book that you consider joyful and that gives you joy to re-read? Or simply comforting? Have you discovered a new book lately that fits the description? 

 

You might not think a presidential memoir would figure into this discussion, but I am taking a lot of comfort from Jimmy Carter’s Keeping Faith, even when the topics are grim. Reading of such an intelligent, capable, principled man in the White House, who never thought he knew everything but was always eager to learn more, and who did a lot more “politicking” than most Americans realize, makes me glad for the time I’ve had on earth.

 

In the middle of the night, though, when I wake to frightening reality, I turn to a different kind of book, and at present my middle-of-the-night reading is Breckland, by Olive Cook, an early volume in the series of “Regional Books” from Robert Hale, Ltd., of London. These postwar books on various regions of the United Kingdom describe landscape, agriculture, architecture, and so on in close and loving detail. They are not fiction: In these books nothing happens. What a relief! It’s as if you are on a walk, a stroll, a ramble with someone who knows the area intimately and points out what you might otherwise miss. After a day in the “real world” where all too much is happening, it is a great comfort to travel back in time to rural England when and where the horrors of the Second World War were finally over.

 

Online, Dana Frost with her “Forced Joy” project, an idea she had when her husband was diagnosed with cancer and one she had to work hard after he died, looks at how to find joy in grief and loss, and Valerie Kaur, a warrior for revolutionary love, writes and talks about how we can focus on love and joy in the midst of hatred and violence. 

Big pot of soup!

Batch of homemade flatbread --

I also watch a few short videos online, including Sean the Sheepman and chef Jacques Pépin. Dogs and cooking are important sources of joy for me, so watching Sean and Jacques at work is a quiet, comforting pleasure. Border collies are still working sheep, and Jacques is still glazing carrots. Ah, how lovely!

 

Painted rock, gift from a dear friend

When you do an online search for “joy” topics, one of the suggestions that comes up over and over is to look for joy in small, ordinary moments, something I’ve done for years. It was crucial back when the Artist and I were so “poor” (in financial terms) that going out for coffee was a splurge, and now cultivating gratitude for small pleasures in my life alone is just as crucial. 

Pleasure and happiness and comfort and joy are hardly interchangeable terms, but joy can be quiet and blend into comfort, don’t you think? Can’t we experience joy in silent contentment, as well as in glad shouts? More than gratitude, I see quiet joy as the realization of all we have for which to be grateful, a kind of overflowing fullness in the moment. 

 

Where do you find yours? Where do you look for it? Are you giving it a big welcome?

The sun was shining!

We played!

Little Joys and Comforts

Hawthorn trees have been a recurring joy to me since I discovered the first one in my meadow. This year I’m appreciating how much earlier they leaf out than some of the other, statelier trees, how sweetly they hold raindrops, and the way last year’s berries (haws) still attract my dog. She will stand on her hind feet to reach the ones on the branches and root through the grass hunting for those on the ground. Funny girl!

 

Sunny Juliet herself is a joy and a comfort both. As she becomes a more relaxed and easy companion, though, I find myself addressing her and speaking of her more and more often as Sarah! Will she ever be as mellow as our practically perfect Sarah? Will her name have changed completely in my mind to Sarah by the time she reaches old age? 

These days, still Sunny Juliet, when she and I go outdoors for our morning rambles I take along a foraging bag and bring home leaves and flowers for my evening salads. Our walks and finds and my salads are all quiet joys of my country life.

Of course, not everything in life can be a joy or a comfort. Sometimes -- though I realize this may sound odd -- I find a kind of satisfaction in understanding something, some event or trend or belief system or outcome, even when I would wish it completely out of existence if I could. How does such-and-such a system work? Why do people pursue certain policies? In what ways are we manipulated to believe and act against our own interests and that of the earth? And how can human interests ever be separated from the interests of the earth’s health? (That’s a rhetorical question. The separation is impossible.) Like a farmer friend of mine, interested in economics as I am myself, I want to understand, whether or not I can change a thing. I would add, and whether or not there is the slightest hope that human beings will see the light in time to save the earth and the human race.

 

With that in mind, I sit down to read Naomi Klein’s bestseller, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. It is not a comfort book, by any means, nor is there anything joyful in the reading (other than the intellect that put the thoughts together), but it makes so much sense that what I cannot understand is how some people think that every aspect of our lives should be “privatized” and others think that pure and complete socialism is the only answer to organizing society. How can people not see that a mixed economy is the only one supporting a society that works for all? How can the world at large not see that private enterprise has important strengths and should not be thrown out but that there are important aspects of life that cannot be left to a winner-takes-all game? 

 

Meanwhile, they who see clearly their own (short-term?) advantage in disadvantaging others are leading country after country, including the United States and Canada, down the winner-takes-all road, and I don’t expect to live long enough to see this turn around, though maybe I will be proven wrong. Maybe, as an optimistic friend believes, the Eighth Prophecy of the indigenous peoples of the world will turn us away from the edge of the cliff in my lifetime. I would love to be wrong in this way! 

Just because -- for the relief of beauty!

Satisfaction in inquiry, in understanding, in an exchange of reasonable views with others is all an important part of my life and always has been. I have that with books and with friends, in my work as well as in my leisure. When evening comes, however, I am ready to welcome comfort. By evening Sunny and I have been outdoors more than once, and I have surveyed the progress of spring in field and forest. We’ve had fresh air and exercise, and my salads of foraged greens are satisfying. Maybe Sunny has had the added benefit of a play session with her new friend. All in all, it’s been a good day, in the bookstore and at home, reading and talking to people and getting out into the natural world. But at bedtime, what I want is comfort. 

 

Maybe a new novel or a book of essays or, not infrequently, something I have read before, perhaps many times, will be my cozy bedtime reading. One favorite in the re-reading category is Christopher Morley’s novel, The Haunted Bookshop, sequel to the equally enchanting Parnassus on Wheels. Everyone in the secondhand book business knows these two novels! They were part of what seduced us, eventually, gradually, but ineluctably, into the bookselling life.

In the 1950s and 1960s, my parents were members of the Book-of-the-Month Club, a subscription book service founded in 1926. Originally, a panel of judges chose each month’s selection, and one year Morley’s novels about bookselling were chosen as a monthly selection, the two books together coming to our family home. Despite the ages of the two main characters in Parnassus on Wheels (it is a romance between two middle-aged people, as well as a paean to reading, books, and bookselling), I was captivated by a story that had, for me, all the necessary dream elements: a horse; a “gypsy” wagon; country life; travel; and books! Then came The Haunted Bookshop, with an attractive pair of young people, mystery, suspense, danger, and love in the air! As a girl, I read both books over and over, and I continue to read them over and over today, decades later.

On the subject of re-reading, as on the subject of books in general, I am passionate. Never re-read? That would be like never revisiting a place once loved, spending no more time with a friend of many years! And as every re-reader knows, each reading of the most familiar book is a new experience. New but familiar, yes. As with people we have known and loved for years, there is always room for surprising new realizations. 

 

When I chose The Haunted Bookshop for my bedtime reading the other night, I thought as I held it in my hands how many associations and memories the book contains. To begin with, my volume is from the same book club edition my parents had, so it brings back my earliest readings, and I pause lovingly over the illustrations, which delight me as much if not more than they did years ago. Now in my eighth decade of life, I have still never been to physical, geographical Brooklyn, but thanks to Christopher Morley, Betty Smith, Alfred Kazin, and other writers, Brooklyn has come into my life – here, in this book, in that “between the wars” period that so fascinates me. But also, the chapter headings, the paper – all these little details are important, and as I hold the open book in one hand and rub Sunny Juliet’s chest with the other – she is lying on her back, unmoving, her feet in the air -- the two of us indulge in the most contented hour of our day together. 

 

Charms of this story for me personally? There is the location of the bookstore, its entrance below the level of the sidewalk, exactly like the imaginary tea room the Artist and I planned for the Marlborough Building in Kalamazoo; a coal furnace, so like the furnace in the basement of my parents’ house, where I, like Roger Mifflin (only without a pipe), would gaze into the flames after shoveling coal and see another world; an Elevated railway, like the wonderful, noisy, smelly El I knew in Chicago; and, naturally, a winsome little dog, with a quaint packing case dog bed, decorated like a library.

There is the excitement of the bookseller when called to appraise an important private library; there are windows with transoms; there is corned beef hash (and that is distracting, pulling my mind away from the story and to breakfast at J&S Hamburg in Traverse City); there is that magic name, later adopted by a Sixties a cappella vocal group, Manhattan Transfer. In short (and I am reining myself in, because I could go on and on in this vein), because this book has been part of my life since girlhood, and because I have read it over and over in the ensuing years, my own life’s memories and associations are part and parcel of my re-reading. I notice in tonight’s reading but decide to overlook the sexist attitudes, including the violent impulses that accompany the leading man’s love for the ingenue, because it is all taking place so long ago, my father only a year and a half old, my mother not yet born – and anyway, it is a story, and these are fictional characters. And it means more to me now, as a story set in a bookstore, than it ever could have before my own bookstore had been around for over 30 years. 

Following the final page of his story, Christopher Morley adds a page about bookstores, first quoting from another of his own books, John Mistletoe:

 

The bookstore is one of humanity’s great engines, and one that we use very imperfectly. It is a queer fact that most of us still have the primitive habit of visiting bookshops chiefly to ask for some definite title. Aren’t we ever going to leave anything to destiny, or to good luck, or to the happy suggestion of some wise bookseller?

 

Without claiming wisdom for myself, I will urge my blog readers – because surely you are all bookstore visitors, too! – to visit bookstores as you go to a potluck dinner, ready to discover and be delighted by something you didn’t know you wanted until it came into your hands. Then your excitement will be a bookseller’s joy.

 

What Counts as a Gift?

 

Last year on Christmas morning I told the Artist that I wasn’t able to wrap the present I wanted to give him. He had bought an old cello that was missing a bridge, and I told him the next time we went to Tucson we would go to a music shop and I’d have a new bridge put on the instrument for him, along with new strings, and that would be his gift. But we never had a chance to make the trip, and today the cello leans against the wall, untouched, in its case.

 

His 2022 birthday gift from me was supposed to be the first volume of Proust’s epic work, which he had finally been convinced (by another writer, not by me) that he wanted to read. I ordered it early and wrapped it and hid it away. When I took the package to the hospital the day after his last surgery, he said he would wait for his birthday, a week in the future, to open it. By then, however, he was in a coma, and when he woke four days later neither of us thought of birthday presents, so I still have that book, still wrapped, never opened.

(Anyone whose life is as yet untouched by grief will no doubt have bailed out by now, and that’s okay. The rest of us, my continuing readers and I, are not having a “pity party” here: we’re only facing the facts of our lives and doing the best we can to keep living, day by day.)

I’ve been listening lately to Anderson Cooper’s podcasts on grief, 

 

…a series of emotional and moving conversations about the people we lose, the things they leave behind, and how to live on - with loss, with laughter, and with love.

 

-      CNN’s “All There Is,” with Anderson Cooper

 

Not listening in the order originally recorded but choosing titles one by one. Four so far. 

 

Anderson Cooper’s father died when Anderson was only 10 years old. His older brother committed suicide by jumping from their mother’s apartment balcony as the mother watched, helpless, afraid that moving toward him might precipitate the jump and hoping she could bring him back from the edge with words. That mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, lived on to the age of 95 but always kept her bedside calendar open to the date her older son died. In conversations with others who have known loss and grief of various kinds – deaths of parents, partners, siblings, their own children, some deaths sudden, others agonizingly slow – Anderson Cooper talks of his father's and brother’s and his mother’s deaths and the aftereffects on him as a survivor, both immediately afterward and continuing, as time goes by. His guests do the same with their losses. The conversations (each one different) are deep and moving as experiences and feelings are shared. 

It can be really hard to open ourselves to grief, because -- who wants to deal with pain?  But over and over in the podcast conversations comes a truth I had to learn by experience (and in retrospect wish I could apologize to friends whose grief I failed to acknowledge adequately in the past), which is that – okay, two truths: first, that pain is unavoidable either way, whether we open to grief or try to keep our hearts closed tightly against it; and second, that acknowledgement of loss, along with opportunities to revisit the departed in conversation with others and, for many of us, in writing, while it may bring tears, also brings a degree of solace. 

A much harder lesson – at least, for me, and Anderson Cooper says for him, as well – is to feel gratitude for one’s grief. Wow. Really! Gratitude in grief, along with grief – that I have felt all along, grateful for the support of family and friends and for the beautiful life the Artist and I had together for so long. But gratitude for the grief? (The idea came to Cooper from guest Stephen Colbert.) That’s harder. I’m not there yet. Not even close.

 

Or maybe I’m not thinking about it the right way? 

 

I can’t feel gratitude for the loss, certainly, cannot feel grateful that my husband died, but – for the feelings and insights that loss brought and continues to bring? Maybe? One of Cooper’s listeners mentioned vulnerability as grief’s gift, about being open to the world, open to other human beings, connecting on deeper levels. That grief and love are inseparable: if we love, sooner or later we will grieve; if we grieve, we have loved and continue to love. 

Still I ask the question: Can grief be a gift? No one who has not experienced profound grief can begin to have an answer, but if you have lost someone close to you, no matter how long ago, what do you think? Can grief be a gift?

Next question: How does grief, for you, fit into the holidays? I’m working on that one, too.

I would not raise these questions on my blog if I thought they were mine alone, but I know others struggle with the same questions, and maybe we can help each other -- if only by acknowledging together the questions we face. Because maybe none of us has answers. Or maybe what is an answer for one person is not an answer for someone else. I don't know!

Anyway, as always, thanks for reading.

The Last Hurrah – with Comfort and Kid Stuff

 

I’ll start with what I call comfort books. Above is pictured a little stack put together today of books that I consider as falling into that category.

 

Cheaper By the Dozen (1948), by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr., & Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, illustrated by Donald McKay, is a story about growing up in a household of twelve children (written by two of the twelve) of parents who were the first “efficiency experts,” otherwise known as industrial engineers, the first to undertake professional motion studies of people at work. Having a dozen children, it was inevitable that their quest for efficiency would spill over into their home life. Read it once, and remember it forever. Belles on their Toes is a sequel.

Life with Father, by Clarence Day, Jr. is an American humor classic set earlier in American life than the Gilbreth titles. The mere chapter titles call up scenes in my memory and make me smile. Father keeps a carriage horses and is skeptical of “letting in” the telephone. I wouldn’t have wanted to live with him, but I love reading the stories.

 

The I Hate to Cook Book, by Peg Bracken, was certainly a classic of its time and launched its author’s writing career, and yes, there are recipes, but that’s only the beginning. Peg Bracken offered comfort to novice homemakers, and she is still comforting today.

 

…I’ve often thought it’s pretty presumptuous of cookbooks to tell me to make Individual Baked Alaskas when I am already up to my hips in Chicken Pilaff and Brussels Sprouts Calypso. I am not about to do it, either, because I. know something easier and just as good, like that lovely orange-cream sherbet at the fancy-food store, and the brownies I made two days ago. Or a rare, fine, immortal glass of Irish Coffee.

 

All of the above qualify as what I consider “comfort books.” Something comforting in an entirely different way is Katsura: A Princely Retreat. I’ve written about it before (and you'll find more pictures if you follow that link), but here’s the cover, in case you’ve forgotten. Sitting quietly, turning the pages, immersing yourself in the images is a calming meditation. And the book has its own slipcase, which it richly deserves.

 

Which (the slipcase) prompts me to go back to cookbook land to tell you about a two-volume, slipcased set of books, The Horizon Cookbook and Illustrated History of Eating and Drinking through the Ages. But there – the title tells you all you need to know, that there is a lot more to read here than mere recipes. 

 

I’ve been showing off lots of new books recently, for children and for grownups, but recently I acquired quite a few “new” old children’s books. No doubt many will bring back memories for my older readers. Not only individual classic novels and old-fashioned series books and readers from bygone decades, but also beautiful things like My Book House, Live Dolls in Wonderland, and – yes! – a couple more illustrated versions of A Child’s Garden of Verses. 

 

You will be surprised, you will be amazed, you will be delighted! We have the ordinary, and we have the unexpected. So come in this Saturday, October 31, or you’ll have to wait until spring to tour my treasure island of – Books in Northport!