Reading--and My Rebellious Nature

Junior high, high school, college, graduate school—that’s a lot of years of assigned reading, so while I love book discussions, sometimes the “assignment” nature of a book club or reading group crosses swords with the rebel in me who says, “No more assigned books! I’ll read whatever I want to read!” I was comforted to hear our township librarian say she sometimes feels the same way.

It helps me that two of the groups I’m part of are very small, and none of the groups meets every month of the year. The intrepid band that formed to read Ulysses is currently reading Anna Karenina together, a much less daunting assignment. It’s long but goes along at a good clip, and we're meeting every other week to discuss two (of the eight) parts at each meeting. Another tiny group (only five women) probably won’t meet again until May, and only two of us have finished the book our May hostess suggested, A Suitable Boy, which may be the longest book I’ve ever read.

The book discussion group that meets at the township library is open to anyone, and different people drop in and out as the spirit moves them. This month’s book is Cutting for Stone, which I have not read (though I read and loved Verghese’s first book, a memoir entitled My Own Country), but I’ll probably go to the meeting and listen to what others have to say. I asked, and the librarian told me I would be welcome without having read the book. That took the pressure off. Bookseller and librarian, we feel the weight of our reading responsibilities keenly, but we can no more read everything than can anyone else, and we have to read selectively, difficult as that sometimes is.

Then there are the tasks I assign myself. A general one is to list every book I read here on the blog but only books I read from beginning to end, which can lead to a feeling that any book I begin I must read in its entirety. But no, that doesn’t work. Halfway through The Book of Salt, for example, I rebelled, feeling like a hostage to the character’s interior life. He would say that he’d met a man on a bridge in Paris, for example, and I wanted to know which bridge, but he wouldn’t tell me! I wanted to be in Paris, not a prisoner in this young man’s head! As you see, this is not a criticism of the novel at all. It was just not where I wanted to be. Now I’m some chapters into An Accidental Autobiography, by Barbara Grizutti Harrison, and for a while I thought I wouldn't keep going, but so far, as I reach the end of each chapter, I begin the next. We’ll see how long Ms. Harrison and I continue together. The punctuation drives me a little nuts, but her way with words and her understanding of memory as neither chronological nor hierarchical has me captivated. For now.

And then there is Dante, lying neglected but not completely forgotten on the top of my dresser. It isn’t that I lost interest in the story, but the translation wasn’t doing it for me. Where is the lyricism I expected of the poetry? Whose translation should I be reading instead? Well, maybe I will, and maybe I won’t! That “should” word in my own question has already roused the rebel spirit who sleeps with one eye open!

What a coincidence! Writing of my neglect of Dante, I went to visit Lifetime Reader's blog and found a topic that made me smile, "Books We Have Hated." Are there books you were assigned to read and absolutely hated? Do you still hate them?

What's Happening on Lake Leelanau Today?

If you drive from Leland to Northport on M-22, part of your way is along the west shore of North Lake Leelanau. Along the north lake, you are only a few miles from the 45th parallel, which in our county runs from south of Leland over to north of Suttons Bay. Now that the lake is frozen over, ice shanties are beginning to appear.


The Narrows between north and south Lake Leelanau is the only place to get from one side to the other, M-204 crossing from one arm of M-22 to the other, from the Lake Michigan side to the Grand Traverse Bay side, and going right through the little unincorporated village of Lake Leelanau, formerly known as Provemont.


"Unincorporated" doesn't mean nothing's happening in Lake Leelanau. This winter a new building is rising on the Narrows, to house a new wine tasting room come summer. See more of the view looking north on my other blog. The other side of the Narrows, looking south, was quieter. Even the ducks weren't doing much more than napping.


How different all of these same scenes will be when summer returns! Fishing will be from boats and docks rather than on ice. Here is a man fishing last summer behind St. Mary's School. (He doesn't seem at all nervous about the presence of swans.) Back in the very old days, when M-204 crossed the Narrows south of the present bridge, a high iron bridge reached from the site of this dock to the other side. Different times, different seasons, but the Narrows remembers.

Cheboygan on Dwellable

C. S. Lewis Recommended Reading Old Books

The exhaustion of my camera batteries last Saturday was bad timing. Not only did we have a terrific blizzard, with snow blowing horizontally down Waukazoo Street for most of the afternoon, but my charger was back at home, so I couldn’t use the bookstore hours to recharge before the evening performance of “The Magician’s Nephew.” Costumes, makeup, sets, kids I've known for years—photo ops galore, and I missed them all. We were glad to see the play nonetheless. The students did an impressive job inhabiting the C. S. Lewis characters in their own script adaptation of the fantasy novel, and they even managed quite creditable British accents, no mean feat in a little northern Michigan town. As my regular readers know, I am not a fantasy fan, but this production held me enthralled.


C.S. Lewis, I was musing, in The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed, went deeper into his topics than the vast majority of writers on the same subjects. What a coincidence, then, when my son sent me a link to text of C. S. Lewis on the subject of reading old books just two days after we’d seen “The Magician’s Nephew.”

If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why—the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. - C. S. Lewis

This is exactly what I used to tell my philosophy students. If you try to read Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, even Aristotle, without knowing the earlier philosophers those men read, you are coming into the middle of a conversation with no idea what went before, and much of what is said will seem to come out of nowhere. Not so. What you’re hearing is fully meaningful only in the context of the entire conversation, as response to or elaboration or rejection of earlier ideas. The full conversation is the history of a culture and its ideas.

As for reading old books, however, I would issue a caution which Lewis also articulated: the value of the older works is not that they are more true or more right than works of our contemporaries but that we can more easily see their errors, as well as their truths, and in seeing errors in old books we are more likely to notice those of our own time.

Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we would now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united....

Not everyone approaches old books with careful scrutiny. Early in my bookstore days I was surprised by the number of requests for older history books by people convinced that books written closer to the time of the events covered would be more accurate. Whatever gave them that idea? Generally the history books written while the guns are still smoking tend to be less informative than later works. A participant in events sees them firsthand, true, but from a single perspective; a combination of perspectives, on the other hand, along with documents that later came to light, allows a larger, more balanced overview.

Every time period has partisans for one view over another, and so it is true, as the seekers after old truths are convinced, that different historians in 2011 give different interpretations of earlier times. But the seeker of truth who thinks that partisanship did not exist at the time of conflict is the victim of a strange delusion. Why would there have been conflict at all—how could conflict exist—if people hadn't seen things differently then, too?

P.S. Gerry always pushes my thought further, and her comment below is no exception. Here is a student essay I found online and recommend for its statement of the problems of historical research. I loved these lines from the student's paper: “Historians view the world, hoping to make sense of it. The world, however, does not speak – we do.”

What do the rest of you think?

My Paper World

It will be a very sad day for me if books are not published any more. The electronic format isn't interesting to me. The electronic book is always the same.... On the one hand, technology is fantastic. On the other hand, if you have an apartment and the book shelves are empty and there's one Kindle standing there, that's depressing." – Veronica Teuber, artist, in the Wall Street Journal

Oddly, given her love for books, the artist is mummifying part of her own collection in beeswax. It’s an interesting story, an eyebrow-raising story, and you can read it here.


Meanwhile, the larger story of the future of books, with e-reader wars, the Borders financial woes and eternally springing bibliospes (book hope) continues to unfold. Last night, in that last-named spirit (yes, I named it, and no, I never studied Latin), I read the prologue and first chapter of The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Discussion, by Allison Hoover Bartlett. All that great gossip from the New York Antiquarian Book fair—okay, I’m hooked! So was the author:

As I roamed from booth to booth, I felt the sensory enticement myself—the feel of thick, rough-edged pages, the sharp beauty of type, the tightness of linen or pigskin covers, the papery smell.

Then there's the smaller picture. Here in Northport, I recently received the news that our wonderful, welcoming little Leelanau Township Library will be closed for the month of February! Help! What will winter residents do? The library has not been painted or had new carpeting for 43 years, and the Board decided it’s time, and I’m starting to wonder (I grind exceeding slow) if I’ll see more people in the bookstore next month, if only for the duration. Maybe an invitation is in order? “Drop in for a visit. Feel free to bring a sack lunch. Please leave your e-reader at home.” What do you think?

I’m having a sale these winter days on my notecards (photo on front, blank inside), dropping the price to $2 each or three for $5. There may be one of your favorite “Books in Northport” images here, or perhaps one you haven’t seen before that will capture your heart and insist on being sent to a dear friend you haven’t written to in way too long.

Words and images, images and words. It’s a big chunk of my winter world.

Horrible News and Donation Address

The morning Shelf Awareness newsletter always has bits of sad news along with the happier items, but today a shocked "Oh, no!" burst from me as I read the following item:

Sad news about Pierre Vos-Camy, a bookseller at Schuler Books and Music, Grand Rapids, Mich. While vacationing with his family and wife's extended family in Puerto Rico, thugs broke into his rental home. Responding to cries for help from family members, he was shot and is now paralyzed from the chest down.

Last week he was transferred to a hospital in Miami, where his wife, Jolene, has stayed. The children have returned to Grand Rapids. He will soon transfer to a rehabilitation hospital in Grand Rapids. His church, Church of the Servant, has begun to set up a fund to help the family meet unexpected expenses, including alterations to their home. Please send any contribution--made out to COS-Benevolent Fund with Vos-Camy Family on the memo line--to Church of the Servant, 3835 Burton St. S.E., Grand Rapids, Mich. 49546. The church will also deliver any mail messages to the family. The church may be reached at 616-956-7611.

Grand Rapids, south of Traverse City and north of Kalamazoo, is home to many part-time Leelanau residents and many summertime Dog Ears Books customers. Schuler Books and Music is a wonderful bookstore. I don't know the Vos-Camy family personally, but there can't be many degrees of separation between us, so I am reprinting the Shelf Awareness article here to share with my readers, friends and customers.

Mid-Week Snow and Reading Report

Seen Near Home and in the Village

Some winter days, like last Saturday, are calm and beautiful—a welcome change from the cold, driving snow of Friday, seen above through my bookstore window.


Saturday’s morning light on snow-covered black locust trunks made the trees look from a distance like white birches, and our neighbors’ little farm stood out from the landscape like a scene from a storybook.


Waukazoo Street in the village of Northport looked inviting, too, on a sunny winter day.


Not all days are sunny, and when the weather turns bleak again Sarah takes it in her stride, literally, as long as she’s given opportunities for fun, exercise and exploration.


But this poor little cedar waxwing outside the Leelanau Township Library on Monday morning could not have been enjoying being outdoors. If it had still been able to fly, surely it would not have allowed me to get so close with my camera, but what to do? My general #1 rule with wildlife is “Do no harm,” which usually entails, for me, doing nothing rather than trying to intervene in ways that may worsen the situation.




After watching the bird polish off a tiny crabapple, I ventured to pluck a few more from the tree and place them within its reach. Where is the little feathered soul now, over 24 hours later?

My Reading This Week

Monday evening I stayed awake long enough to see the main character and first-person narrator of The Book of Salt, by Monique Truong, introduced into the household of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. I might have gotten further in the novel had I not been seduced earlier in the evening by the London Review of Books. Today it was some historical research at the Traverse City Area Library (how long has it been since you looked at old newspaper articles on microfilm?) and the book Oil Notes, by Rick Bass, that claimed my attention. Here is one right-on little observation from Bass that has nothing to do with oil:

There are people I know who dabble, who want to write—no, who want to be writers. But they’re married, or have children, or have a job, or watch the news. There’s no time. Or they need to be inspired. They wait for it, and it comes about once every three years, and half the time in those instances they’re without a pen, or think they’ll remember it—their inspiration.

Restaurant News from Waukazoo Street

Stubb’s Sweetwater Grill is open for dinner this week on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Beginning next week, Stubb’s will also be open on Tuesdays, but that will be bar only. Dinner evenings will remain Wednesday through Saturday. Sounds like a cheery change of pace, doesn’t it? With the weather outside so frightful and all?

Paris and Me

Loving the City of Light

My friend Marilyn was eager to pass along a book she thought I would enjoy. I eyed the title dubiously: The Book of Salt: A Novel. Salt? Humph! But Marilyn (who will laugh at me when she reads this) is more than a discriminating reader: she also makes recommendations sparingly and carefully, so I took a closer look. The magic word jumped out at me—Paris! Okay, Marilyn, now you’ve got my interest! The novel will go onto my stack at home, but already my mind has strayed to Paris.

I’m generally more interested in travel narratives than travel guides. (“Standard travel guides and travel narratives have obvious differences but are similar in that both attempt to convey a sense of place—but when they’re really successful they give us a combined sense of time and place,” writes John Huckans in “Walking on Water in Venice,” Book Source Magazine, January/February 2011.) Guides are good, I’m sure, if you’re in or on your way to a place for the first time, and especially if you don’t speak the language, but I’m usually happy to dispense with them and make do with maps. There, however, was Rich Steves’ France 2011, sitting right on my counter at the bookstore, begging me to open it! How could I hold back? I had to find out what this popular travel writer had to say about one of my favorite foreign countries. (I don’t want to say “favorite” and slight our neighbor, Canada, which is a favorite with me, too.) What would he recommend to the first-time American tourist in France?

My first response to a book of this kind is as subjective and personal as my first assessment of general books on philosophy. If the index for the intro to philosophy text doesn’t have an entry for Bergson, I’m disappointed. Similarly, if the travel guide for France leaves out the Auvergne, the light in my eye dims somewhat. I understand that Paris is the focus of France (it’s where I spent most of my time in the country) and that everyone is wild for Provence, but having fallen in love with the Auvergne I can’t help taking neglect of that region personally.

All right, now that’s out of the way!

It’s over ten years since I’ve been in France, and a few things have changed. Back then I couldn’t wait to arm myself with a Carte Orange for the Paris Metro and bus system; now it’s a Passe Navigo. Plus ça change.... I’m happy to see that the Batobus still operates during summer months and that Canauxrama is still in business.

No index in this book! That’s a little frustrating. --Oops, no, there it is! Never mind....

The little hand-drawn maps (at least, they look hand-drawn) are clear and inviting. They look like something drawn by a friend. I like that.

Tourists short on time must make terrible choices. If you had only one day in Paris, what would you choose to see and do? Steves recommends spending the afternoon in the Louvre. Would you? Not me! David sounded surprised when I expressed this thought to him, so if you live for art, maybe you would want to follow the advice of this travel guide. As for me, unless (God forbid!) it was pouring rain, I don’t think I’d go indoors at all—not if I only had a single day to be there. No, I would stroll the Jardin Luxembourg or the Parc Monceau or any little green square or space that came my way, and I would take my espresso or wine or beer and every bit of food in the open air, as well. I might take a break from the stimulation of the sidewalks and streets and parks to visit a bookstore for fifteen minutes or half an hour. Chances are very good there would be an old church in my path, and every old church in Paris is worth visiting, so I couldn’t go wrong there. I might duck briefly down into the Metro, just for the rush. But give up the afternoon of my single day to spend it in a museum? I guess I’m not that cultured. Or else I’m too much in love.

But the book—ah, yes, the book. It looks very helpful, full of valuable information. I’d say, read it before you go, but when you get there, play it by ear. Actually, Rick Steves tells you pretty much the same thing.


Far from Paris

When I told a friend of mine that I was reading a fantasy fiction novel and finding myself annoyed with the plethora of monsters with medieval-sounding names, she asked if I’d given myself the assignment as penance for something. Good question, Laurie! No, I’d picked it up initially for the title, Top Dog, and opened it because I was promised a hilarious tale of a Wall Street type waking up as a dog. I was, you see, “all about” the dog angle, but along with the man-as-dog I had to put up with wizards, witches, trolls, fairies, angels and many, many other strange beings with much more irritatingly unusual names. There were no towns simply called “Northport,” either. And at the end of the day—that is, the end of the book—my endeavor was rewarded with no surprising insights, no astonishing turn of events. It all seemed very predictable.

I wonder if the very lack of surprise, the clear line between good and evil (or to put it another way, the lack of ambiguity), if even the de rigueur convoluted names are all a way of conforming to the fantasy genre so as not to disappoint the audience. I don’t know. Fantasy is not my genre. Rather, my idea of fantasy is Wind in the Willows or Through the Looking Glass, and those classics certainly do not meet the criteria, if criteria they are, with which I began this paragraph.

Jessica of Greenlight Bookstore has to give me credit, though: I did venture outside of my reading comfort zone this month, which is what she was urging everyone to do.

To the President and Members of Congress

Dear Mr. President, Members of the United States Senate and Members of the United States House of Representatives,

We the people are weary. Urgent issues in our country demand your serious attention and practical resolution, and what do we get? Finger-pointing, name calling, stealing from Peter to pay Paul temporarily, and an occasional proposal or bill shifting the burden from one segment of American society to another. You are not doing your job well enough. It’s time to try something different.

For the sake of clarity and to get the ball rolling, let’s focus on one issue only, just for a moment: the national deficit. Against the advice of those who tell us that a recession is a bad time to try to cut a deficit, most of you seem to want to make deficit reduction a priority. So here is our question to you:

What is each of you, individually and personally, prepared to sacrifice in order to cut government costs and trim fat from the national budget?

How you answer this question will depend on your priorities, naturally. Would you choose to take a reduction in salary? Give up benefits? Reduce the air travel you enjoy at government expense? Perhaps you have other ideas for how you—for the moment, this is all about you—can come to the aid of your country. We are ready to hear from you. This is not about your party affiliation or your constituency. This is about you.

Please step up to the microphone one at a time to answer the question. Remember, the question is not what new sweeping measures you propose—it’s what you, as one individual, as a government employee working for the people of this country, are willing to sacrifice to reduce government spending.

The time has come for serious conversation in the United States of America. Let it begin with you.

Speak clearly, one at a time, please. We the people are ready to listen.

Temptations, Statistics, Productivity, Books and Advice

Up North: Land of Temptations

During our last two Florida winters, it was easy for me to get up early and spend a couple of hours writing before David was awake enough for coffee. The winter mornings were dark, the house cold, our tables stacked high with books—all the temptations, one would think, to either lie in bed late or get up only to wrap in a comforter and read, and yet I followed my work regime scrupulously. So far this winter here at home, I have not been getting up as early. Is the bed warmer or the house colder, that I cling to sleep so assiduously, not rising until there is light around the window edges? I get up and start the coffee, and the second temptation presents itself, which is to get online and check e-mail before sitting down to work. That was impossible in Aripeka. There we had to get in the car and drive miles to a library to retrieve e-mail. The library is the third temptation, because while the libraries we frequented in Florida were filled with people, they were all strangers to us, where as our Leelanau Township (Northport) and Leland Township (Leland) libraries are full of people we know, and everyone is so happy to be out meeting in a cheery public that there is much more talking than reading or working. It will take a little while to find the right balance to my winter life this year, but I’m sure things will sort out before long. After all, we are nowhere near the middle of January yet, with my “official,” i.e., self-directed work-start date of Jan. 15, so maybe I should take these lazy mornings as rehearsals. On the other hand, what good is a rehearsal if undertaken lazily and half-heartedly? To work!


Mes lecteurs français, où sont-ils?

Most bloggers must go through a phase, I suppose, of compulsively checking their stats to see how many people are visiting, from what countries, via what virtual paths, as well as which posts are the most popular. There is also the very unstatistical business of which parts of a post generated comment—often, it seems, the more peripheral sidebars rather than the topic in focus. In general, what will bring people to your site, and what on the site will capture their attention is all quite fascinating.

From that introduction, you won’t be surprised when I confess that I’ve been watching my stats lately, and I’ll admit further that I was pleased to find (by backtracking from them) that “Books in Northport” is now listed on a “Best of the Web Blogs” site. (Though why “web blogs”? I thought “blog” came from web + log.) The piece I find puzzling is the list of countries where my readers reside. That is, I’m not at all puzzled that the U.S. tops the list and that second-place Germany is way behind, but why would I have more readers in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands than in nearby Canada, and why do I have none at all in France? Ça me rend triste!

N’existez-vous pas, mes lecteurs français? Ça me gêne beaucoup, car moi j’aime bien la France et les français, et si vous examinez la liste de ce que j’ai lu en 2010, vous y trouverez deux ou trois titres français. Alors, où êtes-vous? Cherchez-moi!


What Counts as Being Productive?

The answer to this question depends on who’s asking and why. When I ask if my day has been productive, I’m sometimes looking at immeasurables, a sense of accomplishment, as much as a satisfied checklist, and this Wednesday, my first serious at-home work (alone) day of the new year, felt very productive. It began inauspiciously, with my sleeping in until 8:30. Bad start! I should be up by six at the latest to get in a good morning’s writing! But telling myself that I didn’t have to go to the bookstore (Bruce is running things for me on Wednesdays) and so had the whole day to work at my own projects and at my own speed helped me settle down to writing rather than fall into the temptation of checking e-mail first—which, as we all know, can easily expand to fill available time. Before I knew it, I’d written for two hours and had 1700 words of a new story. Again, I’m not letting my editorial self judge anything I’m doing yet: the point for the first couple of weeks is just to “show up for work” and get words down.

Telling Sarah, who had not been denied her morning sortie, that we would go out again for a serious ramble at three o’clock, I next set myself to tackling housework, and as I moved from task to task it came to me what I love about this kind of work—not, I need hardly say, the deadly repetition, which everyone knows is the worst of it but something else that doesn’t seem to get much attention at all, namely the wonderful room it allows for improvisation. Beginning as always with a rough list in my head of things needing doing, I found myself, as always, noticing other things, and there was no one to tell me I had to finish one job before starting another. I get to do whatever I want to do and however I want to do it! In the end, I didn’t accomplish everything I’d set out to take care of, but I got much more done than I’d planned. So there was time productively spent.

Going outdoors for a walk might not sound like a productive use of time. Isn’t it more of a recreational break? All I can say is that it feels like both. I need exercise, Sarah needs exercise, Sarah needs a training session and wants and needs a chance to play, but on a cold day when the sun isn’t shining it takes a certain amount of discipline on my part just to bundle up and get us out there. When we not only go outside but climb a steep hill (that’s nothing for her, of course!), explore the snowy woods, and Sarah successfully obeys my commands to sit, stay and come, by the time we get back to the house it feels as if we’ve accomplished a lot.


Special Orders and Other Books I Couldn’t Resist

A couple people are looking forward to traveling to France. The lucky dogs! That accounts for two or three of the special order books on my list this week. Karen Armstrong’s new book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, I included because so many of my customers are Armstrong fans and because the title intrigued me. Many of Armstrong’s books are on the history of religion. This one sounds more practical—in the sense not of “money-making” (a much too narrow sense of the word, anyway) but in the sense of “doing,” of “practice,” compassion that is not put into practice being nothing but an empty word.

Next I re-ordered, because I love it so much, Jim Harrison’s book of poetry, In Search of Small Gods, and NPR had someone on one evening raving about Edwige Danticat’s Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist, so that went on the list, too, along with a special order from a customer for How Fiction Works. Someone else wanted the new Mark Twain autobiography, and I needed to restock Valerie Trueblood’s story collection Marry or Burn. The children’s book My Name Is Not Isabella appealed to me because it reminded me of a friend’s granddaughter, and Lord of Misrule because it’s an award-winning book by an author from Kalamazoo. Jaimy Gordon must have come to WMU after I left, because her name was not familiar to me.

Anyway, that gives you some idea of the new books I ordered during the first week in January and why. What is the word I’m searching for, an adjective to describe part of every new book order I put together? Not exactly quixotic--. And why is that always-insufficient but better-than-nothing thesaurus tool in my Word program no longer giving me any results whatsoever? Back to the books! The books are always better, anyway, I find.

Cautionary Words

“Words of Warning” sounded alarmist, and I don’t want to cause any spikes in blood pressure. There are just a couple things you should know if you’re driving to Northport this winter.

(1) Don’t coast into town on an empty gas tank! Scott’s Filling Station will be closed until spring, so you need to get gas in Traverse City, Suttons Bay or Peshawbestown if you’re coming up the east side of M-22, in Empire or Leland if you’re coming up the other side. (Is there a gas station open in Glen Arbor this winter?) In the middle of the county, there are gas stations in Cedar and Maple City. On May 16, the Filling Station in Northport will re-open, but until then we will all have to do more careful planning.
(2) For the month of January only, Fischer’s Happy Hour Tavern between Northport and Leland will be closed. This is an annual closure. The Bluebird in Leland closes between Thanksgiving and Christmas, re-opening for the holidays, and the Happy Hour takes its vacation beginning at 8 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. This is somewhat reminiscent of the Parisian system, where everything used to close in August but now the businesses work out different vacation schedules so that shopping will not all close down at once. The difference is that Paris does this during the busy tourist season, and northern Michigan does it in the dead of winter, when most of the tourists are thinking about Mexico instead of pining for Up North.

Moving Ahead, Bookishly and Resolutely

Reading and Writing

My concern over how much of my life would have to be given over to Tolstoy has abated considerably. Anna Karenina, while very long (closer to 800 pages than to 700 in the edition we’re reading), clips right along. That may be in part because I’ve read it before, but also Tolstoy’s style is very modern, in that he jumps right into the story without elaborate, preliminary scene-setting. The last chapter I read last night was the horse race. I didn’t exactly remember but still pretty much knew what would happen, as the mare’s sensitivity was so like Anna’s.

My winter writing is underway. So far I feel I'm warming up rather than producing, practicing scales rather than composing anything of lasting worth, and that feels okay. Sooner or later, I'll hit my stride and stop thinking about what I'm doing. That's when writing is delicious, when it just happens, like weather, and I happen to be in the right place to experience it. But that's what "showing up for work" is all about, being in that place, ready for the miracle.

Another Resolution

I knew I was forgetting something else I’d resolved, but it is this: From now on, I’m only buying fair trade coffee, and a trip to Oryana, the food co-op in Traverse City, on Monday took care of getting that resolution off on the right foot.

Still Ordering Books

For the last two winters, Dog Ears Books was closed for three months. This year, we’re staying open! Hours are shorter (and only four days a week--see calendar at right), but we are very much in business during Snow Season and still ordering new books for our customers, too. This is my plan—to welcome orders in person (in the store), by phone or by e-mail and to process (i.e., actually send in) orders on Monday evenings or Tuesday mornings, for delivery that same week. I’m writing this on Tuesday and sent in my first book order of the year this morning. (That felt good.) Later in the week I’ll tell you what was in that order.

Summer Reading 2011 Is On the Way

You’ve already read about Loreen Niewenhuis’s book, A 1000-Mile Walk on the Beach, coming out in March. Loreen has promised to come sign books in March, and we’re plotting a bigger event for the summer, details to be posted when I have them. You’ll want to read this book, and yes, you’ll have to wait until March. Now word comes of another occasion for summer reading enjoyment, the fourth Emily Kincaid mystery from Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli, Dead Dogs and Englishmen, coming out in July. Not until July, Elizabeth? Yes, we have to wait that long for the latest from the lives of Emily Kincaid and the intrepid Deputy Dolly. Well, anticipation is a good thing, and delaying gratification builds character. Keep telling yourself.

New Links to Other Blogs

Please note a couple of new book-related sites in the blog list at right, Lifetime Reading Plan and Wynken de Werde. (Don’t worry—both sites are in English.) Check them out and get back to me. Were you inspired? Intrigued? Enlightened? Intimidated? (What do all these words have in common?