Birds, Books, Bookstore Table, Dog with Issues

Birds in Books

 

I picked up and began reading a biography of Gene Stratton-Porter, one of my mother’s favorite writers, and wished my mother and I could discuss the author’s life together. After a while it occurred to me that I sent this book to my mother, who read it and returned it to me to re-sell as a used book (my frugal mother!), and still I had not read it before myself. How illuminating to learn that Gene (born ‘Geneva’) Stratton-Porter was not only a popular novelist but also admired for her nature books (I had her Book of Moths once) by writers as famous as Christopher Morley, who likened her work on birds (she also loved and photographed and wrote about moths) to that of the work of another of my naturalist heroes, Jean-Henri Fabre, on insects. High praise! 

 

In reading of her life and the agreement she made with Mark Doubleday to publish all of her work, exclusively, one nonfiction nature book for every novel (the fiction sold better, but Stratton-Porter was insistent on having her nonfiction published, as well, so the agreement was alternate years for each genre), I was surprised and delighted to learn that Mrs. Doubleday, Nellie, was none other than the writer Neltj Blanchan, author of Bird Neighbors; Birds Every Child Should Know; and The American Flower Garden. It is easy for me to imagine wonderful conversations between these two women naturalists and writers. Stratton-Porter was a devoted gardener all her life, especially devoted to wildflowers, from her Indiana childhood to her later years in California. 

 

My mother fulfilled a dream when she and my father visited the Limberlost (though I think my father may have waited in the car while my mother made the tour), and I shall have to make the trip myself one day (she was always a stickler for “I shall”), as a pilgrimage in honor of my mother. It looks like a beautiful place to visit, anyway.

As it happens, I don’t have any of either Stratton-Porter’s or Blanchan’s nature books in stock at the moment, but I do have The Burgess Bird Book for Children, by children’s author Thornton W. Burgess, whose Old Mother West Wind series and other stories featured talking animals were so popular with child readers of the early 20^th century. His Bird Book is told as stories, also, with dialogue between, for example, Peter Rabbit and Jenny Wren – “intended to be at once a story book and an authoritative hand book,” with illustrations by none other than famous naturalist-artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes.

Never a big Burgess fan myself, I appreciate the Fuertes illustrations more than the Burgess text, but I have had several Burgess fans among my bookstore customers over the years. Chacun à son gout, as my friend Hélène used to say. 

 

 

Quick Bookstore Story

 

And now here, to change the subject, is a little story that is very Leelanau: One of our neighbors came by the bookstore on Monday and said he and his wife were going to pick up sandwiches at the New Bohemian Café and that he’d like to buy me lunch, also. Or I could join them down the street, “but there’s no indoor seating.” No problem, I said. Come on back, and we’ll have lunch at my big table. I moved books to make space, and halfway through our lunch my neighbor slapped his hand on the top of the table and exclaimed, “This is my parents’ old dining room table! You must have found it at Samaritan’s Closet” – a thrift store in Lake Leelanau, as had indeed been the case. “So many birthday parties we had around this table,” he said, and I was for some reason happy to know about the table’s former life and to think of it as progressing from birthdays to books, all here in Leelanau County. 

 

Gotta love these little stories that connect us country people! And the Danish Modern furniture of the 1950s? Yes, I remember!

 

 

Another Quick Bookstore Story

 

This one you won’t believe. I can hardly believe it myself. My first customer of the morning on a rainy Thursday was a man from London, England. His wife is from Traverse City, so they visit every year, and he knows my shop well and goes right to his favorite sections. When he brought his choices to the counter, he said -- he really, really said this! -- “I have to tell you: This is my favorite bookstore.” 

 

I thanked him, so pleased -- thrilled! -- that I didn’t press for more specific information. (Favorite in Michigan? In the U.S.? All-time favorite ever?) Don’t investigate a compliment too closely, I say. Just smile graciously and thank and let the glow warm you for the rest of the day.

 

Recent Books Read (Since Last Post)

 

The first one below was a novel I re-read. Fabulous! Love the Socrates Fortlow character and wish there were more books featuring him.

 

Mosley, Walter. WALKIN’ THE DOG (fiction);

Covington, Kathryn Rankin. THE RIPPLE OF STONES (fiction);

Roth, Michael. TIME BETWEEN SUMMERS (fiction/nonfiction);

Green, John. THE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED (nonfiction);

Lively, Penelope. TIGER MOON (fiction)

 

 

Peasy Report: A Milestone, a Message, a Sigh

 

The new wading pool wasn’t a milestone, but Peasy loves it. He loved splashing in his dog-friend Molly’s wading pool (bigger than the one he has, the only one I've found so far) after a long run-and-play session in the high desert, so when the weather warmed up (and it will again, I’m sure, despite the current cool spell) I figured he would love a wading pool of his own here in Michigan.

 

The milestone, however, is something different, and what made this particular red-letter event even more special was that it was practically a non-event. Did Peasy even notice? 

 

A little background first --.

 

Peasy, like Sarah, is not nuts about being groomed. To brush him at all, I resort to a soft curry comb made for horses. It won’t do much when he starts shedding and needs his undercoat combed out, but he tolerates the brush and is becoming accustomed to having it used on him, which is more than half the battle.

 

Toenails, though. That’s another story. (Do you know any dog that likes toenails clipped?) My old Nikki was so submissive that she didn’t put up a fuss, but Sarah was a real rebel when it came to her feet, and that was Sarah, the practically perfect dog, who never had anything bad happen to her in her whole life! So what to do with a dog-boy who has had as many rough challenges already as Peasy in his young life? 

 

Well, I am following the wisdom of Patricia McConnell on “reactive dogs” and that of Jean Donaldson, author of The Culture Clash. Rather than resort to a muzzle and a wrestling match (the alternative being outright sedation), I have been slowly and patiently desensitizing Mr. Pea to the clippers. I let him sniff them, I stroke his feet with them, I “clip” the air near his legs, and we’ve been doing that for a couple of weeks. Finally on Thursday morning I decided it was time to try following up the familiar routine with clipping a single nail. 

 

He hardly seemed to notice! Good dog!!! I was so excited! 

 

Working to desensitize a dog to reduce fear in situations the dog has long found frightening is a long, slow process. It takes a lot of patience. It’s time-intensive. But ask yourself: how long do you think you will be living with your dog?  Why not take the time to make both your lives easier and more pleasant? I could say this message comes from Peasy, and if he understood about telling you what makes dogs happy, and if he had even noticed the milestone in his life, I know he would have sent this message.

 

Lest I mislead with partial information, however, I must admit that the dog with issues still has them. The other evening when I retrieved, from under a porch chair, a sock he had stolen and chewed up, he showed me his very scary, snarly, threatening-to-bite face. You wouldn’t want to see it, believe me. I opened the porch door and sent him outside to stay out by himself for ten minutes. We didn’t fight about it-- he just had a time-out. He was then his regular sweet self the rest of the evening. On the other hand, as I say, he had no meltdown over the nail clipper, so I think we are continuing to make progress. I hope so. It isn't always easy-peasy. This dog has issues -- but I believe he has a lot of potential.

 

Wild Children in the Woods

[Reminder: Tonight is the tree-lighting in Northport, after a day of merchant open houses and caroling. The horses will be pulling a decorated wagon through town, giving free rides, beginning at 3 p.m. Come and join us all day long!]

When Emily St. John Mandel wrote a post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven, she presented readers neither with a totalitarian, police-run urban world nor a barren desert in which gangs of young men, all looking like pirates, miraculously found fuel enough to roar endlessly through empty lands on fantastic vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. Instead, when the infrastructure of civilization collapses in Station Eleven (subsequent to a global pandemic), survivors, of necessity, fall back on old ways. A troupe of Shakespearean players, for instance, roves from one isolated rural community to another (cities having become uninhabitable), hunting and foraging and preparing food over open fires. 

In two more recent novels, also by women — one set in England and the other in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan — the modern world has not (yet) collapsed but is seen by pivotal characters as something to escape. 

Fiona Mozley’s Elmet tells of a father who moves his two motherless children to the woods, where he builds a house intended to last forever, long after he himself is gone, although they are only squatters on the land. His children are a boyish adolescent girl, given to brooding silences like his own, and a fey, girlish boy, the narrator of the story. 

We kept on with our silly childhood games long after we were much too old. Our copse provided the materials we needed and an undulant terrain in which to run and hide. In another world we might have grown up faster, but this was our strange, sylvan otherworld, so we did not. And that, after all, was why Daddy had moved us here. He wanted to keep us separate, in ourselves, apart from the world. He wished to give us a chance of living our own lives, he said. 

- Fiona Mosley, Elmet

The father hitherto had made his living with muscles and intimidating size. He fought with bare knuckles in illegal bouts “far from gymnasiums and auditoriums where the money could be big…,” bouts arranged by toughs and travelers (gypsies). The money stakes ran high, and other stakes were even higher: sometimes his opponent did not survive. Thanks to his reputation, he was also hired from time to time by men with great wealth and few scruples to intimidate debtors slow in settling up. But he longs to escape a life of crime and fighting, a life he can live without having to grub for money, and in the woods is the freedom he covets for himself and wants to provide for his children. 

We realize early in the story — not only from the confusing, dreamlike opening scene, from which the rest of the story is told as flashback, but also from interactions between characters and our own knowledge of the greater world — that the father’s hopes for the family’s future are destined to fail. The question is only when and how and how spectacularly the failure will come upon them. 

The Marsh King’s Daughter, by Karen Dionne, is a survivalist tale set in motion by violent crime. The father of the narrator has abducted a 14-year-old girl, subsequently his captive for years in wilderness isolation. When she becomes pregnant and gives birth, their daughter is thus a product of rape, and even as the kidnapped adolescent grows older, with a child of her own to protect, fear of her captor’s mercurial temper and sadistic nature keeps her submissive to him. 

I can see now that the reason my mother was indifferent toward me is because she never bonded with me. She was too young, too sick in the days immediately after I was born, too scared and lonely and collapsed in on herself from her own pain and misery to see me. Sometimes when a baby is born in similar circumstances, she gives her mother a reason to keep going. This wasn’t true of me. Thank God I had my father.

- Karen Dionne, The Marsh King’s Daughter

The daughter’s relationship to her father is complex. She both fears and adores him. She hates his brutality toward her mother (whose small lapses in judgment or skill are rewarded with beatings) and is terrified of the punishments she herself sometimes receives (often when least expected), but at the same time she cannot get enough time outdoors with him, learning wilderness survival skills while her silent, distant cipher of a mother stays in the cabin cooking or sewing. The father is an unpredictable and sometimes punishing idol. Nevertheless, her life depends on what he can teach her, and being with him is an escape from the claustrophobic cabin. 

He’d lay out a trail for me while I was off playing or exploring, and then it would be up to me to find it and follow it while my father walked beside me and showed me all the signs I’d missed. Other times we’d walk wherever our feet took us and he’d point out interesting things as we went along. Drifts of scat. A red squirrel’s distinctive tracks. The entrance to a wood rat’s den littered with feathers and owl pellets. My father would point to a pile of droppings and ask, “Opossum or porcupine?” It’s not easy to tell the difference.

And so, long after she and her mother escape and return to “normal” life, after her father is finally captured and tried and sent to prison, after she changes her last name to escape the curiosity of anyone connecting her old name to her criminal father, and even after she marries, hiding her past from her own husband, and has two little daughters of her own — after all those years in which she realized very clearly what a cruel and crazy man her father truly was all along — when he finally escapes from prison after thirteen years, killing two guards in the process and launching a manhunt along the U.P.’s Seney Stretch, a question in her heart pushes Helena to track him down herself, as much as does her knowledge of the man and her need to keep her own daughters safe. She knows he has only laid a false trail to lead police into the Seney Wildlife Refuge, that he has undoubtedly gone in another direction. But as she tracks she can’t help also looking for signs that her father, for all his evil, loved her all along.  

Three novels by three different women, two with Michigan settings and one with a story spooling out in England, all of them taking place, for different reasons, in wilderness. In Station Eleven and The Marsh King’s Daughter, survivalism has been imposed on the characters, in one case by global apocalypse and in the other by the crime of one man. The wanderers in Station Eleven are not fleeing civilization but hoping to find remnants of it, while Helena in The Marsh King’s Daughter comes to see her U.P. wilderness isolation itself as the trap she would escape, despite her love of the woods and its creatures and the pride she takes in knowing her way around trackless land. Helena tells us that there is plenty in civilization she could live without but that she loves electricity. Characters in Station Eleven also have nostalgia for electricity’s gifts. And yet in both cases the world of nature is described in loving detail, as something not to be entirely left behind, and it is clear that these two authors value both wilderness and civilization, seeing the drawbacks either presents in a “pure” state.

Only Elmet seems to present a desire for off-the-grid living as longing to return to the Garden. If only the world will leave them alone, we want to believe, father and children can be happy in their isolated Eden. But how likely is the world to leave them alone? Is it the very lack of ambivalence in this story that leads to the most hopeless final pages of any of the three novels?

I began writing this post wondering if women writers, if women in general, are more drawn to recreating wilderness lives. While reading The Marsh King’s Daughter, for example, I could not help thinking of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River, in which a young girl sets off alone to search for her mother, living off land and water, hunting and foraging — and, again, in Michigan.  Michigan. Its very name, Michigamme, conjures up grandeur and mystery. Among those who long to retire “Up North” (or, in England, “to the country”), is it men who would bring high-tech loud toys and women who would go back to an earlier era, and is that reflected in fiction by men and women? 

Or is that, as I’m sure it is, an overly simplistic binary gender division?

Certain it is, however, that men have produced reams of commentary and analysis on works by those of their gender and have developed countless theories on works written by male writers,  ignoring works of women, as if only a male sensibility could have produced those novels, so why should not women have their turn? Today, on Books in Northport, they do.

Three Light Meals

• Recipes for a Beautiful Life (nonfiction), by Rebecca Barry
• Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (nonfiction), by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
• The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (fiction), by Katarina Bivald

I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration for me to claim that my reading in general is catholic. Catholic: “broad or wide-ranging in tastes, interests, or the like; having sympathies with all; broad-minded; liberal” (Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, Fully Revised and Updated, 1996). A tiny exaggeration, maybe, that “all” part. You’d have to look through several years of my lists of books read to find much if any science fiction or fantasy, and a lot of bestsellers never make it to my nightstand, either. But “wide-ranging” seems a fair claim.

What the three books I’m putting together in this post have in common is that all are (1) light reading and (2) written by women. (Clive Cussler fans, be forewarned!) One was sent to me as an Advance Reading Copies (ARC), another the final published version, and the third (not in the order they are listed above) I initially opened only to see where to shelve it in my bookstore.

Here’s how I’ll refer to them: Recipes; Encyclopedia; Broken Wheel.

(1) Recipes confounded me. The author and her husband decide to move their family from New York City to a small town upstate. With a much smaller income, they become owners of an old building that needs major repair and renovation. The “simple life” is never simple except when looked at from the outside. The author’s proposal for a novel is accepted, however, and if she can get it written in a year they’ll have enough to live on until the money starts rolling in.

This is an entertaining book. The children, as children will, say lots of funny things. (Very funny. I was reminded of Jean Kerr's The Snake Has All the Lines.) Rebecca and her sisters have that sister thing going on, and I relate to that, of course. Friends share meals and wine and worries and laughs. The writer tries to find time to write and struggles to find inspiration, while children and small town life keep catching her up in a giddy swirl.

Some of the “recipes” in the title are things to fix for meals, but most are fixes of a different kind: “Recipe: How to Heal Your Heart,” for example, or “Recipe: Get Kids to Listen to You.” Like most of us, the writer of this books “learns” a few lessons, passes them along to us – then forgets them and has to re-learn them a few days and a few pages later.

Most baffling to me, though, is that this book is basically a book about how the author did not get her book written. The novel proposal? Advance spent, but author and editor agree the draft of the novel is, in the author’s own (unspoken) words, “unpublishable.” So Simon & Schuster published this story from her real life instead? From diary, blog, whatever? Well, clearly she had to work to give it a shape, but all I could think was that writers who spend their advances and fail to meet their deadlines are very seldom so fortunate! I didn’t know what to think, in the end. I still don’t.

(Am I simply blinded by envy? Not completely, I don’t think. I want to get my novel written!)

(2) Encyclopedia is the book I picked up to figure out where to shelve it. Glancing at a few pages, I was slightly annoyed at first. Is a collection of slightly quirky lists worthy of being a book? I was dubious, resistant, but the book pulled me in. Finally I sat down with it and kept reading. Soon I was smiling – and then laughing out loud, to the alarm of a few silent browsers in the stacks.

We are warned on the cover that the author of this memoir has “not survived against all odds” or “witnessed the extraordinary.” This is an ordinary life. Here, under H, is a typical entry:

HAPPINESS  

I’m turning left. Look, everyone, my blinker is on, and I’m turning left. I am so happy to be alive, driving along, making a left turn. I’m serious. I am doing exactly what I want to be doing at this moment: existing on a Tuesday, going about my business, on my way somewhere, turning left. There is nothing disconcerting or unpleasant or unfortunate about this moment. It is exceptionally nice, plain, and perfect.

Not everything is perfect, even in an ordinary life. There are ordinary annoyances and ordinary worries. But Amy has a way of dealing with those, too:

RETURNING TO LIFE AFTER BEING DEAD  

When I am feeling dreary, annoyed, and generally unimpressed by life, I imagine what it would be like to come back to this world for just a day after having been dead. I imagine how sentimental I would feel about the very things I once found stupid, hateful, or mundane. Oh, there’s a light switch! I haven’t seen a light switch in so long! I didn’t realize how much I missed light switches! Oh! Oh! And look—the stairs up to our front porch are still completely cracked! Hello, cracks! Let me get a good look at you. And there’s my neighbor, standing there, fantastically alive, just the same, still punctuating her sentences with you know what I’m saying? Why did that used to bother me? It’s so . . . endearing.

This is a charming book! Well, I found it so, anyway. I finished the last page wishing the author would walk in my bookstore door so we could meet. But then -- quite honestly, I am nowhere near as light-hearted and fun as she is. No, I’m sure it’s best to keep our friendship one-sided, within the covers of her book.

(3) Finally, the ARC of Broken Wheel. How can a bookseller resist a book about a bookstore? How can a bookseller in a small town in the northern Midwest resist a story about a bookstore in a dying town in the cornbelt? Can a bookstore “save” the town?

Despite the hope and excitement I felt when opening to the first page, it took me a long time to enter fully the world of Broken Wheel. I kept turning back to the author’s name on the cover, wondering if English might be her second language and why, even so, no one in the publishing house had corrected sentence moods that so obviously should have been in the subjective, e.g.,

There were only two other customers in the entire bar. One looked as though he was sleeping....

Well, was he sleeping, or did he simply look as though [counterfactual] he were? I did not keep track of how many times this error found its way into the book – and I know it is a small nit to pick – but it happened over and over again, and every time it distracted me, my inner editor pulling me out of the story where I wanted to lose myself, so I was halfway through the book before being finally able to stop obsessing over was/were. I hate when that happens! I don't want my inner editor springing into action when all I want to do is immerse myself in a story.

Back to the novel --

A stranger comes to town. It’s a classic setup. In this case, the stranger is Sara, come from Sweden to visit Amy, who has just died. The town itself seems very near a final death gasp. So....

Will Sara get together in the end with Tom, the character so obviously meant for her? That’s one question we ask as we read this novel, though we’re pretty sure what the answer will be, given the kind of book it clearly is. Will the townspeople ever go in the bookstore? Will they ever buy books? Will they read books? Most importantly, for all concerned, will people’s lives change because Sara came to Broken Wheel and opened a bookstore? You can pretty much guess the answers, but that doesn’t take away the pleasure of the story. This book is one Sara herself would have shelved under “Happy Ending Guaranteed.”

Hot, humid, busy summer days call out for the relief of light reading. Chick-lit fiction and humorous memoir can be very healthy choices for the sun- or work-addled summer brain. The perfect prescription, however, must be tailored to the individual, so the final choice, as always, is up to you.