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.

As May Approaches

Do you see her?

Seasonal sights

A recurring obsession in my life, spring ephemeral wildflowers, comes into focus now for its all-too-brief season, briefer than spring itself, which began earlier with winter aconites and Siberian squills (blue flower above) in the yard and will extend beyond the days of shy woodland beauties as the first impressionist flush of returning life in the branches of trees all too quickly swells unfurling into shade-providing leaves. Right now, however, the time of ephemeral blooms is just getting underway, although my photographs here, from two and three days ago, are not an accurate report of today in the woods. 

My old news here is of Dutchman's breeches, blooming above, and of trillium and toothwort preparing to bloom. Will trillium and toothwort flowers open today before I get these words thrown out into the world?

Daily I watch buds in the orchard, as well as on my own little apple trees and solitary plum. When will the cherry trees blossom? people ask. We are all hungry for spring’s abundant, harmless beauty.

Spring rain was abundant this year, far too abundant in many places (lots of flood damage), and even in Leelanau swelling creeks and ponds and creating temporary bodies of water in low places. Some, like the ponds in my yard, lasted only 24 hours, while others deserve their lovely name, vernal pools, and these days, morning and afternoon, I visit both the ephemeral and the year-round ponds to watch ducks and geese and cranes and gulls. 

One morning I was rewarded by seeing three lesser yellowlegs, a single bird at a vernal pool and a pair on a larger, more populous body of water. The pair was gone the next day, the bachelor a day later, all of them on their way north to Canada’s boreal forest land. Hawks, too, are migrating north, but wild turkeys remain, turkeys and mallards courting and breeding here among us.

Just passing through....

A busy bookshop day

We had a lovely gathering of people for poet Fleda Brown’s reading last Saturday as we celebrated National Poetry Month and Indie Bookstore Day. I forebore photographing my guest, as it was her first public event since back surgery, and she was still strapped into a white plastic, torso-hugging brace. “A bionic poet!” I exclaimed. She may not have appreciated that name but was pleased, as was I, by her audience, and we were all very pleased with her. On the most serious of subjects, this poet manages to cast a sideways glance, providing a wry look at our human absurdity, while never losing sight of life’s priceless details. Her poems and essays are gifts to the world.

For all Saturday’s unwelcome cold (spring is a season of many short, teasing setbacks), even after the poetry crowd dispersed my day in the shop continued busy right up until 4:30. Where did all these book-lovers come from? Serious browsers, good sales, great conversations—it was like a day in July, all the more heartwarming coming as a surprise in chilly April.

Fleda Brown's 2025 visit to Dog Ears Books

Trend or anomaly?

My phone often makes a sound as for an incoming text when no text is coming in, as if the phone is tugging at my sleeve or nudging my arm to say, Pay attention to me! You’re not paying attention to me! Apparently a new "thing" for young people on college campuses these days is the phone-free gathering, where attendees sit with hands free and look into each other’s faces and talk directly to one another, making the conscious decision not to let their phones dictate their every waking minute. Isn’t that a hopeful sign?

(When an old friend and I were going to get together for the first time in many years, I suggested that we leave our phones in another room. We didn't miss them at all.)

Another development in the growing rebellion against digital technology (more astonishing to me than a return to vinyl records) is the rediscovery of VHS. Movies in boxes! Don’t have a VCR? You can rent that, too! I am told that even CD and DVD technology amazes more and more young people, accustomed as they are to streaming music and movies. What do they make of VHS tapes?

(In novels written a hundred or more years ago, we read of parties where young people gathered around a piano, singing songs, thrilled with the arrival of new, up-to-date sheet music. Country life without a piano might still feature a fiddle, guitar, harmonica, or other instruments. Stamping feet. Clapping hands.) 

I wonder (the eternal springing of hope!) if perhaps my busy spring Saturday of bookselling is related to these other stories, another turning away from tiny screens. Maybe we will have an Indie Bookstore Year!

What is on your mind these days?

This morning I watched grey clouds outside my window as they moved slowly from south to north. A south wind. Occasional glimpses of blue sky. Then a more uniform grey, devoid of contrast, reminding me of ground recently monochromatic white. My first coffee of the day, whether at 5 a.m. or 6:30, is my time to come awake to the world gradually, to look back on days past and plan the days ahead, to read or write, to—I admit it!—look at my phone to scan headlines as well as to see the weather forecast. “Violence is never the answer,” people around the world say solemnly today, a predictable chorus, as they condemn the latest lone shooter. Who would disagree? Yet if war is not violence, then nothing is. That is one of my morning thoughts.

First faint flush of green!

Trees. I think about trees daily and look forward every morning to being outdoors again among them, although I confess to taking up arms against autumn olive and popples advancing into land I want to preserve as meadow, just as I contemplate possible ways to discourage spotted knapweed in my meadow without the use of poison. Controlling nature is not possible, nor is it my wish. I am grateful for the proliferation of squills and forget-me-not in my yard and yellow-headed coneflowers in the meadow. Finding another hawthorn in the meadow delights me. I don’t want to be engulfed by autumn olive and knapweed, however, and they would take over the world if they could. Such greedy bullies! 

My constant companion

Sunny Juliet has no such concerns. Whatever grows or doesn’t around us, the outdoor world delights her, and she has a genius for turning up deer bones. It is as if she and the coyotes have made an agreement—they will make the kills, and she will scavenge the bones—while in the yard at home, life this spring involves an astounding number of tennis balls, more and more of them turning up where they had been lost in winter’s snow. 

Sunny taking a bone break from tennis ball play

It is good to have a dog in one’s life. A constraint on freedom, to be sure, but then, there are many constraints on freedom, which can never be absolute. In our family and civic lives, we are frequently held back by consideration for others; in our outdoor lives—every move we make!—nature sets boundaries on what we can do. I step carefully in the woods, watching where I put my feet and testing a slender tree before trusting it fully as a handhold. Sunny bounds ahead confidently, much more stable on four legs than I am on only two, but we are together in our enjoyment. We are here now. We are blessed to be here now.

Scenes & Thoughts From Life & Lit

"Can we play ball?"

 

This is what spring looks like. 

 

At least, it is what the month of March so often looks like here in northern Michigan, as the calendar announces spring in the midst of continued snow and ice. 

 

But a thaw brings its own troubles. Frozen mud ruts are jarring, but a slithery mud wallow can be much more difficult to navigate. And do we want the 70-degree temperatures in March that family in Minnesota and Illinois had recently? I should say not! Heaven forbid the “darling buds of May” be tempted to open any earlier and risk a killing frost!

Future Mudbath Here

Meanwhile, living in a book –

 

Published in 1859, the action of George Eliot's Adam Bede takes place in 1799 against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, but world-historic events are not the author’s concern. We are told the time only because the narrator insists that “all this happened, you must remember, nearly sixty years ago,” and so, she says, we should not be surprised that Adam exhibits a touch of peasant superstition along with his keen intelligence or that “Hetty’s sphere of comparison was not large.” The novel's world is a circumscribed rural world of a bygone past but also includes the inner, infinitely complex worlds of the people who lived there in that time.

 

Reading Eliot's classic novel in the 21^st century, it is difficult to view it, as many did in 1859, as the “vile outpourings of a lewd woman’s mind.” Seduction, pregnancy, and infanticide do occur in the story, but hardly in “lewd” language. Of the seduction, we see only kisses and an arm around a waist, while the infant is more abandoned than murdered—criminal, yes, but neither violently nor without feeling—and between the seduction and the abandonment, the terrified flight of a young woman never before on her own in the world has her pregnancy named to us by the author only, circumspectly, as her “hidden dread.” There are no graphic scenes or language.

Winter continues.
Seasonal road season is not here yet.

Shocking readers was not George Eliot’s aim. Rather, she encouraged the enlargement of sympathy for our fellow creatures.

 

The story takes place at the turn of a century over 300 years ago. We see the faces of George Eliot’s characters as their own friends and families see them, and at the same time we feel the beating of their hearts as if those hearts were our own. Hopes, illusions, doubts and all the rest of the changing weather that passes through their souls we experience along with them as, along with what we see, there is what the author allows us to feel, which is more than we might for our own neighbors and friends whose hearts are hidden from us. As the omniscient narrator tells a story so universal that it might have taken place at any time in human history, we are introduced not only to people as they appear to each other but also to the inner lives of each. We see clearly the querulous, jealous mother-love of Lisbeth Bede, the near-worship of young Seth for his brother Adam, Adam’s hard and unforgiving judgment of those who lack his devotion to work, Hetty’s inability to feel sympathy for anyone’s feelings other than her own, and Dinah’s gentle saintliness that asks nothing for herself—and if Lisbeth and Seth and Adam, Hetty and Dinah were our neighbors we might stop with what we see and judge them by a single standard, much as does the voluble Mrs. Poyser, with her rock-ribbed sense that her view of things was the only right view. But granted access to their inner doubts, fears, and hopes, we share (if we are sympathetic readers) in the author’s sympathy for them all.

Weak sun trying its best to shine --

A friend and I were texting one recent morning about writers able to move readers to such sympathy. As I have long said of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, you might be unable, in real life, to tolerate sitting next to one of her characters on a long bus ride, but thanks to her insights into that character’s experiences and the marks it has left on the soul, a reader understands the why behind, for example, someone’s maddening anger or overwrought sensibility. By contrast, no subtlety or great knowledge of hearts is required to create a fictional hero or villain, only the willingness to play God and divide the human race into the saved and the damned. “An author needs a vision of human nature and unusual writing skill to produce characters that truly reflect reality,” my friend noted. 

Vision, skill—I would add that it takes generosity of spirit on the part of the writer, a largeness of soul. And a reader willing to open her own heart and mind to the vision of such a writer cannot help but feel increased sympathy for mankind in general.

 

How can it be that I never read this novel before? To think that I might have missed it entirely! It will be part of my mission as a bookseller to urge its reading to others, though I realize that not all readers will find it as compelling as I did because Adam Bede presents a couple of possible stumbling blocks for 21^st-century readers. 

First, there is the dialect. Repetition and context aid in translation, however, and a reader quickly realizes that ‘mun’ stands for ‘must,’ ‘war’ for ‘were,’ and ‘nor’ for ‘than.’ Also, the dialect is stronger in some characters’ speech than in others and occurs not at all in the exposition, so screw up your courage and dive in!

 

A more general stumbling block for many would be the novel’s opening pace. The story begins slowly and builds slowly. We see country people at their work and at their worship, the author in no hurry to cut to the action, her paragraphs long and dense with description. While impatience on the part of a reader will be ill rewarded, I can promise that once things begin to happen there are plenty of sudden scene changes and increasing drama.

Ice moving out of Omena Bay at last!

With eyes on the forecast –

 

I’m back in my bookshop today, for the first time since—was it really Thursday, March 12? Almost two weeks ago?! That’s what the double whammy of a couple feet of snow plus a debilitating cold will do to the most determined and intrepid bookseller. But she is back among the living, friends, and happy to be here for you once more.

Somewhere in the future will be more blue skies.

Without the blue snow!

And now? Will I take spring break next week along with everyone else in Northport, the public school and our hardworking friends at New Bohemian Café? Is there a road trip in my near future? Or will I stay put and be a destination for someone else? Much depends on the weather, my friends, as is so often the case in our extraliterary lives, but I am here this week, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, for sure, March 25-27, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., so stop by if the spirit moves you. 

And someday soon Sunny will be rolling in clover!

Raspberries, Books, and Eudaimonia

Sunny harvesting black raspberries

Too tired after a very busy bookshop day to make another batch of jam on Wednesday evening, I fell asleep over a book until awakened by high winds and rain battering the front porch windows. Time to close windows and go to bed. Up early in the morning, there was time for jam-making, even for a second cup of coffee. 

Mixed with Bardenhagen strawberries

Coming to a rolling boil

My evening reading this week is The Merrimack Valley: A Farm Trilogy, by Jane Brox, which is not the idyllic escape reading you might imagine from the title. Her grandparents came as immigrants, mother’s parents from Italy, father’s from what was then Syria, and life was not a bowl of cherries for anyone. As the author saw local history, stories of “failure” flowed through the lives of valley inhabitants, from indigenous peoples forced out by Europeans to later small farm operators pressured to sell out for financial reasons. Where one generation struggled to make a living, newcomers brought with them (or adopted) different ways of life, and the older ways of living on the land were supplanted by newer methods and technologies, as well as suburban encroachment. 

There was no way to compete with crops being grown more cheaply and efficiently on better soils, or soils that simply had not yet been exhausted. The poorer upland farms were the first to go, though I still see one now and again—a handful of cattle wandering a rocky slope or picking out grasses among the pines, a wrackline of saved, rusted machinery alongside the house. One light selves the night, and every time I pass by I wonder who or how?

- Jane Brox, In the Merrimack Valley: A Farm Trilogy 

The author’s parents hung on in the stony valley. Early on, the family’s original 35 acres deeded to an immigrant grandfather in 1902, though small by standards farther west, was large enough to sustain a dairy herd. When the dairy operation was no longer feasible, her father kept working the orchards (mainly apples) and fields of the popular vegetables (he saved Hubbard squash seed every year) that the family sold at their roadside farmstand each year. Jane made a place in the stand for fresh herbs, but it was corn and tomatoes and beans, squash and pumpkins that the customers wanted. Those and the apples.

Anyone who would plant an orchard must be undaunted by time, willing to wait long years with little chance of seeing the finest seasons. And since an orchard is land narrowed to one crop only, anyone who would plant an orchard must abide by the final decisions. The chosen rootstock, size, variety, the methods of pruning, are promises that can’t be gone back on, promises requiring care to the end.

An orchard is a commitment.

A third-generation Leelanau farmer grows cherries around my home on land leased from another neighbor, but Jane and her sister left their Massachusetts farm, while their brother’s drug use, celibacy (no children to help on the farm), and general unreliability made him an unlikely candidate for another farming generation. Her parents growing old, Jane came home and tried to work with her brother but found it impossible. Then their father died. 

Jane Brox is a poet. (Her father had a hard time seeing writing as work—the fate of many artists whose parents shake their heads over their children's life choices.) Because she lives by words and employs them so masterfully, her stories of “failure” have a beauty not found in most stories of what the world deems success, and even if history is a tragic progression through time (as it so often seems), surely the finding and sharing and preserving of beautiful moments is a worthwhile life’s work. But I have only just begun reading the second book in the Brox trilogy so cannot tell you where it will go in the end. 

My current morning reading (one book for bedtime, another to start a new day) pleases me in a different way.

Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life was written for a popular audience by one of the foremost classicists in England, Edith Hall, a professor at Kings College, London. Dr. Hall, however, the first woman to have been awarded the Erasmus Medal of the European Academy, is no narrow scholar, and the way she champions Aristotle is, to me, absolutely delightful--undoubtedly because (I admit) it affirms my own preference for Aristotle over Socrates and Plato. 

In her introduction, Hall directly addresses the question of Aristotle’s views on women and slaves, the most troublesome parts of his philosophy for those of us who love all the rest. “I stress,” she writes, “Aristotle’s consistency in arguing that all opinions must always be open to revision."

If you receive incontrovertible evidence that your opinion is wrong, then changing your mind, which some people might condemn as inconstancy, is worthy of high praise. ...[So] I like to think that if we could talk to Aristotle, we could persuade him to revise his opinion on the female brain.

- Edith Hall, Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

(And his opinion of slavery, as well, I would add.)

Hall admires Aristotle for the same reasons I hold his writings dear: Aristotle did not see human embodiment as loathsome or regrettable, and he neither accepted nor promulgated absolute rules for behavior. (Dr. Hall finds his writings in many ways “very modern.”) He was interested in the entire physical world (not only life in the polis), in the senses and the emotions, and he was very concerned with the practical matter of how human beings could live good lives.

What was a good, happy life? How could it be achieved? Aristotle wondered about and pondered many aspects of the universe but perhaps this above all—eudaimonia, the good life.

Aristotle thought that general principles are important, but without taking into account the specific circumstances, general principles can often be misleading. This is why some Aristotelians call themselves ‘moral particularists.’ Each situation and dilemma requires detailed engagement with its nitty-gritty particulars.

I love Aristotle’s metaphysics, in that there are no ghostly (Platonic) Forms apart from matter, and I love his idea of the soul (the beginning of action) and his fascination with all of living nature, but it is the primacy of his ethics that, for me, too, makes his philosophy important. Edith Hall’s contention is that his way of looking at Aristotelian ethics is as relevant today as it was for the ancient Greeks. 

I am only in the initial pages of this book but already so excited by it that I couldn’t wait to write something here on the blog and have ordered a couple new paperback copies for store stock. Not that I expect everyone to start loving philosophy, but doesn’t everyone want to be happy? And what if, as Aristotle believed, it is impossible to be happy without trying also to be good? How can you live in such a way as to be happier, no matter what your life situation? 

Confession: I do not wake up happy every day. I miss my life partner, the Artist. Nightmare gremlins can hang on into the morning dark, too. Then, taking only one day off from my bookshop a week this summer and still having a dog to exercise, laundry to do, grass to mow, and gardens to water and weed, I occasionally feel overwhelmed, because whatever needs doing in my home or business, if I don't do it, it doesn't get done.

So it takes dog kisses and good coffee to put me in a better morning mood and remind me what a fortunate life I have. My own bookshop? Sunny Juliet? An old farmhouse with trees and flowers and room for Sunny to play? How lucky is that? It's the life the Artist and I dreamed about for years before we were able to make the dream come true, and I still have everything but him—which is a huge, unfillable lacuna, but still, every moment and every inch of my life is enriched by memories of our life together.

Picking berries and making jam, which seems today like a never-ending task, will soon be at an end for another year, and the fruits of my labors will last all winter long. Come January, I'll be spreading summer sunshine on my toast and sharing it with family and friends. And yes, I can afford to become a sustaining member of Interlochen Public Radio, too. I don’t want to imagine northern Michigan without that resource, and thinking about Aristotle and eudaimonia has inspired me to step up. 

Life is not always easy, but it is good.

Sunny says, "Life is good, and ricotta is delicious!"

April Was a Long Month

I'm still not accustomed to listing my "Books Read" monthly, so April is a little late, but here are 2024 "Books Read" #63-78, interspersed with some scenes from spring Up North for your viewing pleasure. (I removed the numbers from the list to avoid formatting problems.) We have truly been having some perfect days. No offense, Shakespeare, but May in Leelanau gives June a run for its money, in my opinion.

Sedaris, David. When You Are Engulfed in Flames (nonfiction). In parts hilarious and then terrifying, typical Sedaris. A book for those the world counts as adults, it seemed the perfect choice to begin my second quarter’s reading on April Fools’ Day.

Rich, Simon. Ant Farm: And Other Desperate Situations (nonfiction). Very short pieces, very small books, lots of laughs and shocks of recognition. This would have been an equally good choice to finish on April 1, but I’d left it at the bookstore.

Parkman, Francis. The Oregon Trail (nonfiction). Vividly written and an important title in Americana, this is a book every American should read -- but not one I will keep on my shelf to re-read. The Indians (many tribes encountered) were on the frontier because it was their home (some pushed west from prior homes); trappers and traders were there to make their livings; “emigrants” (pioneers, we call them now) were traveling west to make new homes for themselves, for a variety of reasons; and soldiers – rag-tag and undisciplined as they often were – had been sent by the government. Parkman and Shaw went as tourists, for sports and spectacle. Parkman in particular (he is the one who writes the account, at least) wants to see tribal preparations for war and then warfare itself. He is disappointed when peace is made, saving lives. His passion for killing buffalo becomes mind-numbing the longer it continues, because most of the time he isn’t killing for food but only, it seems, for something to do, because he doesn’t pretend it was a real challenge, describing the animals as “stupid” and emphasizing that there is very little danger involved for the hunter. One doesn’t think of a young man taking on arduous frontier travel in the years before the Civil War as a “tourist,” but that was the impression I came away with in the end, glad to reach the last page.

Lesley, Craig. River Song (fiction). This is a sequel to Lesley’s Winterkill, which I haven’t read. (I start an author’s work with whatever title first comes to hand.) River Song moves along at its own pace, most of the time without the bloody conflicts that seem always below the surface, but violent acts of the past surface in the visions of Nez Perce protagonist Danny Kachiah and must be laid to rest if he is to find peace, and there are threats to the Native people’s way of life in the present, as well.

Hillerman, Tony. Talking God (fiction). The Navajo culture is fascinating, glimpses into museum culture eye-opening, and the interweaving of apparently unconnected plots was beautifully done, but what I cared about most was detective Joe Leaphorn and the way he goes about his life in the face of terrible loss.

McGuane, Thomas. Keep the Change (fiction). The novel really got underway for me when Joe Starling stole his girlfriend’s car to drive cross-country to his home state of Montana. All the Montana landscapes and ranching details put me right in the scene. I couldn’t help wondering, though – did no one give him grief over driving a pink convertible? There were no remarks made at all? Hard to believe. Also, this novel deserved a better title, in my opinion. (And I still prefer his nonfiction book, Some Horses.)

Lin, Amy. Here After (nonfiction). For me, memoirs come in subgenres. One such that I enjoy is the travel memoir; another that I have been reading compulsively for the last two years is the grief memoir. Amy Lin’s is the second kind. It is very raw, very true. “We shared a language that was all our own. I am now the last speaker of it.” There is a puppy. “I thought Kurtis and I would love the puppy together. Without him, I feel entirely unable. I do not say a word out loud, but I do not feel anything for the puppy at all.” There is more, much more. She keeps going, and eventually she realizes she loves the puppy, and then at last she writes a book. Her husband always told her she was a writer.

Raban, Jonathan. Bad Land: An American Romance (nonfiction). The 20^th century was underway when a wave of would-be homesteaders from Minnesota and as far east as Europe were persuaded by Milwaukee Road brochures that Eden was theirs for the taking, if only they would claim free land in eastern Montana. Raban begins his explorations with a grandson of one homesteading couple, and from there he explores shells of ghostly former towns and follows the fortunes of those who stayed and those who left. His descriptions of the bleak, spare landscape are as haunting as the stories he finds.

Pferdehirt, Julia. More Than Petticoats: Remarkable Michigan Women (nonfiction). Brief biographies of truly remarkable women, many but not all of whom were familiar names to me. Though I had no idea of all the Michigan connections before reading this book, I found all the stories fascinating and would even without the Michigan roots and branches. A book for women, men, and young people, as well.

Krueger, William Kent. Windigo Island (fiction). Set in northern Minnesota and northern Wisconsin, the landscapes of this novel are familiar, and there is a lot in the way of indigenous culture, along with the challenges indigenous peoples still face today. Not really escape reading. I will be interested to meet the author when he comes to Northport in May with his new book, The River We Remember.

Krueger, William Kent. The River We Remember (fiction). As was true of Windigo Island, there is a mystery element to The River We Remember, also, but there is more to it than who-done-it. A major theme of the book seems to be how the past – and especially its violent chapters, such as wars – continues to haunt the present. Land and the love of it also play strong roles. Of course, with a dead body right at the start, not everything is what it seems.

Leelanau Township Library will hold a discussion this evening, Wednesday, May 8, 7 p.m., on William Kent Krueger’s The River We Remember. The author will give a county-wide Leelanau Reads presentation at the auditorium in Northport and sign books afterward for purchasers on Saturday evening, May 18. Both events are free, but if you want to attend the May 18 event, please have your name added to the list at your respective county library. 

Varawa, Joana McIntyre. Changes in Latitude: An Uncommon Anthropology (nonfiction). Is this book travel? Memoir? Anthropology? Often the “uncategorizable” book is the most interesting kind. In this one, the founding president of Project Jonah, a save-the-whales organization, decides at the age of 54 to travel to Figi and eventually marries a much younger Fijian fisherman, becoming part of his family in a small native island community. The author lived to age 84, but what happened to her and her husband between the end of this book and the end of her life, I have no idea. 

Penny, Louise. Still Life (fiction). This is the third mystery I’ve read of the Three Pines books, but it is the first in the series and takes place before Inspector Gamache and his wife move to the rural village. I know many people have to read a series in order, but I have always begun with whatever came to hand. It was interesting, as I read this first book, to see how the author introduced her characters (already familiar to me) the first time around.

Yamazaki, Paul. Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale* (nonfiction). Yamazaki’s tale takes the form of an interview in which he answers questions before, during, and following an event at City Lights in San Francisco, a store for which he has been the principal book buyer for half a century. City Lights does not carry most bestsellers (“not consistent with our values”) but encourages browsing, discovery, and – above all – joy. Says Yamazaki, “I think that’s the point of being a bookseller and the point of reading –and, really, the point of life.” Though unknown to this legendary bookseller, I am proud to be among his colleagues in the hinterlands.

Theroux, Paul. The Happy Isles of Oceania (nonfiction). I thought I had read this book before, but now I don’t think so. In this book, he is grieving the breakup of his marriage but otherwise has a pretty decent time in the South Pacific. I think he went back later, with a cell phone and all that paraphernalia, and did not enjoy himself much at all, but that’s a different book. Read this one instead. Time travel in your armchair!

Golden, Renata. Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment (nonfiction). I was expecting a completely Chiricahua-focused book, and this collection of essays ranged more widely than that, but anyone who loves history and nature and mountains and dogs and life will appreciate Golden’s thoughts and the way she expresses them. Her Chiricahua Glossary is priceless! Highly recommended.

* 

When City Lights bookseller Paul Yamazaki was asked, “What to you constitutes a meaningful life?” here is how he answered the question: 

“The point of justice, to me, is that everyone has an equal shot at joy, but joy is much more than just being so-called ‘happy.’ Joy is the enhancement of happiness through knowledge. We as booksellers have more of an opportunity to spread that joy through the books we present and those we find meaningful. Books are still, in my mind, one of the great technologies. For the transference of imagination, there is nothing better, to my mind. For the broad expanse of sharing and the interplay of imagination, it’s hard to think what could be better.” 

Yamazaki sees dialogue with books as increasing the possibility of joy and says, “I think that’s the point of being a bookseller and the point of reading — and, really, the point of life.”

Yamazaki and the fictional Roger Mifflin, different as they were as individuals and as booksellers, would have been entertained by each other, I’m thinking. There would also have been deep mutual respect.