reading | dual personalities

December 4, 2013

What do you seek so pensive and silent?* What are you reading?

by chuckofish

I have been all over the board (and map) recently with my reading choices. I read a good mystery by James Lee Burke, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead. I like the detective Dave Robicheaux and the author knows what he is writing about. The characters are not wooden and/or cardboard and the locale is detailed and real. A lot of bad things happen, however, and so I probably will not be in a hurry to read more, but if you like good, well-written mysteries, here you go.

From the low life in Louisiana I headed to lovely Botswana and the fourteenth entry in the #1 Ladies Detective series by Alexander McCall Smith. As I have said before, there is certainly not a lot to these novels. Nothing much happens and some of the characters are downright annoying, but when I am in the right mood, I don’t care. I like Precious Romotswe and her little white van. The author skillfully weaves a gentle tale of friendship and family. We are reminded that people are the same everywhere and the important things in life do not change. It is good to be reminded of this.

From there I moved on to the wonderful Marilynne Robinson and her engagingly titled book of essays When I Was a Child I Read Books. I can relate to that. I love everything Marilynne has ever published–and sadly that is not a whole lot–but she is one of those people who, if I ever met her and tried to have a conversation with her, I would feel like this:

She just knows so much and is so articulate. But she is on my page. She looks at history in context. She likes to give credit where it is due. She questions arrogant scientists. She is a Calvinist. I highly recommend her, if you are up to it.

Now I am back to the what-to-read-next question. What are you reading?

*Old Walt Whitman

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August 22, 2013

“The world was hers for the reading.”*

by chuckofish

One of the great things about traveling is discovering new used book stores. We went to four used book stores–one in Denver, two in Laramie and one in Boulder. And, of course, I bought some books!

They usually look like this one in Laramie. One of the small pleasures of life.

Another small pleasure? College/University bookstores!

Don’t you love used books?

*Betty Smith wrote that in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

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July 1, 2013

Off-season

by chuckofish

Last week we were in Boca Grande, Florida, staying in a luxurious condo generously loaned to us by a good friend.

It was glorious.

Clearly I am an off-season person. One of the joys of the off-season in Florida is, of course, that there are so few people around. It is quiet and relatively peaceful. You have the beach almost to yourself and the pool is peaceful except for a few polite southern children who respect your space.

It is possible to live in the moment and really relax.

Our daughters, the over-worked TV exec and the on-a-budget graduate student, could let their hair down.

Daughter #2 sliced and diced for us while daughter #1 mixed perfect margaritas. Yummo.

All week I never logged on or in to anything. (Unlike this guy.)

To each his own.

I preferred to walk on the beach and collect seashells.

The weather, I might add, was perfect–never warmer than it was at home in our flyover state. And there was always that proverbial tropical breeze blowing. Plus, we spent hours cooling off in the pool which was surrounded by lovely Floridian flora.

Then we would go into town to eat lunch or have ice cream.

Then repeat.

Enjoy a lovely dinner.

Enjoy the sunset.

We got all dressed up once and went to the fabulous (and historic) Gasparilla Inn on our second-to-last night.

I read a lot of Nathaniel Hawthorne–my kind of beach reading! And we watched a lot of Designing Women, Season 2 which daughter #1 brought along, plus various movie favorites of the mindless variety, i.e. Viva Las Vegas, Ghostbusters II, and others too embarrassing to name.

Mix in endless mother/daughter chatter and you have a priceless vacay.

Nevertheless, it’s always nice to come home, isn’t it?

But I sure do miss my girls.

5 Comments

April 30, 2013

No time to read?

by chuckofish

“Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.”

― David McCullough

They sure don’t make ’em like him anymore.

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March 20, 2013

At least we amuse ourselves

by chuckofish

Feb. 3, 1859 “The writer must to some extent inspire himself. Most of his sentences may at first lie dead in his essay, but when all are arranged, some life and color will be reflected on them from the mature and successful lines; they will appear to pulsate with fresh life, and he will be enabled to eke out their slumbering sense, and make them worthy of the neighborhood.”

Feb. 20, 1859 “How much the writer lives and endures in coming before the public so often! A few years or books are with him equal to a long life of experience, suffering, etc. It is well if he does not become hardened. He learns how to bear contempt and to despise himself. He makes, as it were, post-mortem examination of himself before he is dead. Such is art.”

–H.D. Thoreau, A Writer’s Journal

I wonder what old Thoreau would have thought of blogging? I think it would have suited him, don’t you? A laptop in a little cabin in the woods.

3 Comments

March 8, 2013

The good reader*

by chuckofish

Winslow Homer, “Girl Reading”

“The only advice … that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play that Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions — there we have none.”

–Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book? (1925)

*”Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

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February 8, 2013

This and that

by chuckofish

February is a month for catching up on dormant needlepoint projects,

Progress!

organizing drawers,

and reading

I am almost finished with Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter and I highly recommend it.

“As I have told it over, the past visible again in the present, the dead living still in their absence, this dream of time seems to come to rest in eternity. My mind, I think, has started to become, it is close to being, the room of love where the absent are present, the dead are alive, time is eternal, and all the creatures prosperous. The room of love is the love that holds us all, and it is ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven’s. Or is it Heaven, and we are in it only by willingness. By whose love…do we love this world and ourselves and one another? Do you think we invented it ourselves? I ask with confidence, for I know you know we didn’t.”

What have you been doing?

5 Comments

January 14, 2013

This and that

by chuckofish

When daughter #2 was home over the Christmas holiday she made a concerted effort to read some contemporary fiction. (You can read about it here.) I told her I would read The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach so we could talk about it, and, always the good mother, I did just that.

Well, I tried to read The Art of Fielding. I really did. I read at least 60 pages before I threw it across the room (metaphorically) and gave up. It is just pretentious showing off in the worst sophomoric way. For instance he gives his characters stupid names: Skrimshander and Starblind and Affenlight. Okay, we get it; you read Moby Dick. And I just couldn’t take the way he always writes “freshperson” instead of “freshman”, as in “freshperson year”. Please. The characters and story were not enough to overlook these minor irritations I’m afraid. Life is too short for this drivel. And, hey, baseball-as-a-metaphor-for-life has been done many times before, and by far better writers.

Sorry, daughter #2. I tried (but not very hard).

Luckily, I took the advice of my niece Ellen and sent away for The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich. What a find! This is beautiful prose at its best…and about Wyoming! It is a deep and true and pitch-perfect observation of Life. How could I not love a book by someone who writes, “I met my husband at a John Wayne film festival in Cody, Wyoming”?

Gretel Ehrlich is a writer from California, who went to Bennington, UCLA film school and the School for Social Research in NYC. But she left all that baggage behind when she went to Wyoming looking for solace and discovered that “true solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.” She is no sophomore.

Meanwhile, my Saturday estate-sale-ing turned up no Big Finds, but some good books.

Have a great week and happy reading!

3 Comments

January 9, 2013

Note to self

by chuckofish

I felt my spirits rise when I had got off the road into the open fields, and the sky had a new appearance. I stepped along more buoyantly. There was a warm sunset over the wooded valleys, a yellowish tinge on the pines. Reddish dun-colored clouds like dusky flames stood over it. And then streaks of blue sky were seen here and there. The life, the joy, that is in blue sky after a storm! There is no account of the blue sky in history. Before I walked in the ruts of travel; now I adventured.

Henry David Thoreau, Journals, Jan. 7, 1851

Oh so many books to read (and re-read) in 2013! Do you have a pile of new books to read in January?

6 Comments

December 31, 2012

With lots of love and happy wishes

by chuckofish

Over the holidays I re-read Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart, which I discovered over twenty years ago. It is really marvelous. Here she sums up what I believe to be the very true essence of a woman’s happiness:

“When you think of me you must think of me as one who is truly happy. It is true, I want a great many things I haven’t got, but I don’t want them enough to be discontented and not enjoy the many blessings that are mine. I have my home among the blue mountains, my healthy, well-formed children, my clean, honest husband, my kind gentle milk cows, my garden which I make myself. There are lots of chickens, turkeys and pigs which are my own special care. I have some slow old gentle horses and an old wagon. I can load up the kiddies and go where I please any time. I have the best, kindest neighbors and I have my dear absent friends. Do you wonder I am so happy? When I think of it all, I wonder how I can crowd all my joy into one short life.”

Times have not changed that much if you substitute a station wagon/mini van for the horse and wagon. And don’t kid yourself that she didn’t have a “job”. She worked harder than I ever have at my cushy flyover university. At the center of her happiness is love and the freedom to do what she wants.

I highly recommend this book as a good way to start the new year off on a positive note. It is available here.

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