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| Annuals and perennials complement one another. |
First out of the chute, if you haven’t already read my most recent post, about Sarah Shoemaker's upcoming book launch, please do so now! September 6 will be an exciting evening, I promise!
My New Way of Dealing with My New Life
This summer I have been working on what I call the Scarlett O’Hara principle. Funny, because years ago an Aries horoscope named Scarlett O’Hara as a “typical” Aries, and I thought, “Oh, no!” I did not want to think of myself as spoiled, vain, and selfish! What I’m calling the Scarlett O’Hara principle, though, has nothing to do with becoming any of those things. I take the principle from her line, “Oh, I can’t think about this now! I’ll go crazy if I do. I’ll think about it tomorrow.” I’ve been doing this with almost everything I don’t need to act on immediately.
Can’t find something? Stop looking. Think about it tomorrow. More to do than time in which to do it? Do what I can today and think about the next thing tomorrow.
Because I can’t do everything at once, anyway, so why worry about everything at once? And I must say, this approach – new to me -- has served me well so far this summer.
The Dog!
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| Patiently waiting.... |
Sunny continues to be challenging. The instructor at puppy class (two classes to go) recognizes SJ’s high energy level and suggested I “have a talk with [my] vet” (by which I think she was hinting about doggie downers), but we are making progress, and at home my little girl is better and better all the time. Her big hurdle is learning to deal with distractions, because she gets SO excited and overstimulated in the presence of OTHER PEOPLE and OTHER DOGS!!! Not reactive, just overstimulated. But she’s my girl.
“Cheating”?
My subject heading today refers to the fact that I wrote a long e-mail to a friend about what I’m reading these days and then, after going on and on about the books, told her I would probably use it in a blog post, and so here it is, amplified even beyond the e-mail but definitely springing from and using portions of that message.
What I’m reading these days:
At the porch table: BITING THE DUST: THE WILD RIDE AND DARK ROMANCE OF THE RODEO COWBOY AND THE AMERICAN WEST, by Dirk Johnson. Very good! The writing is excellent, and the history, mythology, and reality of the West come through loud and clear, as well as clearly distinguished, as we are introduced to various rodeo cowboys and follow them around the punishing, often lonely and rarely remunerative rodeo circuit.
At the other end of the porch: PROGRESS AND POVERTY, by Henry George, a 19th-century bestseller (outsold in its time only by the Bible) that, sadly, changed no government policies in England, the U.S., or anywhere else, as far as I know. Beautifully written, too. I am happy to say that one other friend of mine is also reading it, which is a miracle, as it’s hard to get many people excited about reading economics. After following all the author’s arguments, I have arrived at the payoff, his solution, the one it seems no one wanted to put in place, despite the popularity of his book.
In the bathroom (doesn’t everyone?): IN PRAISE OF FOLLY, by Erasmus. I’d take Erasmus over Martin Luther, his rival in religion, any day, but the style of this book hasn’t set me on fire. Dante was easier to grasp. The humor is eluding me, but I soldier on – in small bites.
In the bedroom: AWAKENING FROM HISTORY, by 20th-century journalist Edmond Taylor, an autobiography/memoir that takes its title from a line in James Joyce’s ULYSSES, Stephen Dedalus saying to Mr. Deasy when he, Stephen, goes to Deasy’s office to collect his teacher’s pay, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Taylor was in high school in St. Louis, MO, during the First World War and after college started into journalism on the ground floor (more like the basement) until he was working as a foreign correspondent and seeing firsthand what was going down in Europe in the late 1930s. Painful parallels to our world today, but I doubt many people would want to read this book, as the sentences are long and convoluted. It’s hard to reconcile journalistic writing, in fact, with the author’s style in this book, but the book is the story of his intellectual and moral growth over the course of his life and career, so while facts are important, the real story is in how he saw certain facts at one time and how he later saw them, i.e., what he learned and when and how he learned it.
At the bookstore: GUNFIGHT: MY BATTLE AGAINST THE INDUSTRY THAT RADICALIZED AMERICA, by Ryan Busse. This is a book I would dearly love to have every American read, whichever side of the gun debate they’re on, but I know many don’t want to read about guns or politics, and this is about both. But it is very, very readable and unfolds like the drama it is in real life. The author grew up with guns, hunting with his father and grandfather, but the family was very safety-conscious, his grandfather’s best friend and the friend’s father having been killed (intentionally, though, not accidentally) by neighbor with a gun. To Busse, guns meant family and bonding and good times together. The NRA in those days, he says, was all about family, too, as well as promoting gun safety, so he went to work in the gun industry, and while it wasn’t quite what he expected, for a while it was okay. Then the NRA, he says, took a turn toward the dark side. People think the NRA is in thrall to the gun industry, he says, but in truth it’s the other way around: everyone in the gun industry has to kow-tow to the NRA or be squashed like bugs. This book is the story of one man’s awakening political conscience, his loss of naïveté, as well as the story of the NRA taking America hostage, building a political machine on a base of fear and hate. But as I say, imminently readable. The steps in Busse’s personal career, as well as national events are vividly recounted, so that the book reads like a page-turning thriller.
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| Turtlehead opening its blossoms |
Books Read Since Last Listed:
78. Steinberg, Michael, ed. Peninsula: Essays and Memoirs fromMichigan (nonfiction)
79. Alexander, Elizabeth. The Light of the World: A Memoir (nonfiction)
80. Vonnegut, Kurt. Armageddon in Retrospect
81. Emerson, Elizabeth. Letters from Red Farm: The Untold Story of the Friendship between Helen Keller and journalist Joseph Edgar Chamberlin (nonfiction)
82. Jones, R.S. Force of Gravity (fiction)
83. Gibbings, Roberty. Coming Down the Seine (nonfiction)
84. Shoemaker, Sarah. Children of the Catastrophe (fiction – ARC)
Sarah Shoemaker of Northport, Michigan, author of the critically acclaimed Mr. Rochester, has a new novel coming out this fall. Children of the Catastrophe, set in the city of Smyrna in the early 20th century, is, as the author herself describes it, a story of family, love and loss, crisis and survival. The book’s release date is September 6, the day after Labor Day, and Shoemaker will be at the Leelanau Township Library that evening to meet and greet the public. Dog Ears Books will be on hand, as well, to sell books to those wishing to purchase, which the author will be happy to sign.
In her new work of historical fiction, Shoemaker goes behind the bare facts to imagine two families over the course of years leading up to a tragic real event in history. Early in the novel a marriage is arranged within Smyrna’s Greek community. The bride is one of four sisters, the groom an only child. Parents of the two (especially the mothers) have traditional concerns about qualities they wish to see in a partner for their respective children, but happily for the bride and groom in this case, they are attracted to one another from the start, and soon a new generation of Greeks is growing up in a happy home in Smyrna, little suspecting that their world is about to be utterly destroyed.
There are, Shoemaker said in a recent interview, 27 million refugees in the world today, and every one of those people represents “a family, a community, a way of life that is forever lost to them.” In large world events – every catastrophe, especially – it is easy to lose sight of particular individuals and families. Yet every war, every famine, every horrendous headline event changes the world forever for people who were up until then, most of them, living very ordinary lives.
What must it be like to have almost everything and then suddenly to lose it all? How does this affect families, and what differences are there in the responses of different family members? Different generations? These are questions Shoemaker sought answers for in her novel.
Shoemaker has lived in Greece and also for two years in Izmir, Turkey, the present seaport city on the former site of Smyrna. She knew the history and heard the personal story of one survivor whose entire family was lost in the Great Fire (1922), also known to Greeks as the Catastrophe. So, all in all, she felt this was a story she could write.
“Every time I see pictures from Ukraine,” Shoemaker said to her interviewer, “our most recent world events that impact people’s lives – seriously -- I see those people now, having written this book, differently, because I see them as individuals who’ve had lives.” She observes that it’s easy to lose sight of individual lives when we see masses of refugees in events not happening to us. But – “This could be us sometime. Or this could be somebody I care about sometime.” What tragic events do to real people’s real lives is what Shoemaker wants readers to take away from her novel. And in this aim, she succeeds brilliantly.
As a reader, one comes to live inside the story, to live inside houses inhabited by people one comes to know. One hundred years later in time and far distant in space, while reading we inhabit the world of early 20th-century Greek Smyrna and feel connected to the characters’ hopes and dreams, sympathetic to their problems, concerned for their lives. In the end, we realize that their tragedy is our tragedy, in that it is a human tragedy, and we are all human beings, despite our differences.
-- Can you tell I am excited about this book? It is going to be an excellent choice for book clubs, too!
Tuesday, September 6, 7:30 p.m., Leelanau Township Library, Northport, MI: Sarah Shoemaker and Children of the Catastrophe
P.S. You can hear the complete interview with Sarah Shoemaker on the Library Love Fest podcast from Harper Collins, publisher of Children of the Catastrophe. Sarah Nelson, vice president and executive editor of Harper Collins, introduces and interviews Sarah Shoemaker in the podcast.
