Category Archives: Books

American Dipper

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American Dipper

The most unusual feature of this rather dull colored little bird is that it walks underwater, à la those old deep-sea divers with the big brass helmets, canvas body suit, weighted belt and lead shoes. It does have strange feet, so it might be able to grip the bottom, but I suspect that it has a way to regulate its buoyancy, so that it sinks to the bottom, but still has enough oxygen to hold its breath.

We (being Dave, Anne and I) drove to Ann Arbor. Dan, since he had been in Saint Louis little over 24 hours, wanted to stay a little longer and catch up with his friends. He’ll join us at the cabin later. It is hot here too and there is no AC at Chez Harry’s, but for a night we can make do. I have a fan, Dave has the basement and Anne is home. It’s all good. Harry and Jane fixed dinner and we all dined on the back deck. It was a lovely evening for dining out, sort of speak.

We listened to “Big Sky” by A. B. Guthrie Jr. The third in our trifecta of audio books with a Montana theme. This one is set in the 1830s and follows two boys who journey west from Kentucky. They both want to be mountain men and halfway through, both have managed to keep their hair. One disturbing aspect of the novel is its pervasive use of the N-word. Now, there is not an African-American character in the whole book (another disturbing feature), but I still wonder at the use of this now hateful word. The book was written fifty years ago and employs plenty of other colloquial words and phraseology, but I still stutter at each utterance of this word, even when it is spoken by a white speaker about themselves. Still, it is an interesting story that most closely traces our travels than any of the other audio books that we have listened to.

PS – It is now already much cooler than before.

Steinbeck

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Cypress Point Lettuce

“All in all it was a good firm-grounded family, permanent and successfully planted in Salinas Valley, not poorer than many and not richer than many either. It was a well-balanced family with its conservatives and its radicals, its dreamers and its realists.” – East of Eden

Dad, Anne and I went to the Steinbeck Center in Salinas. We had been before, with Jackie and the boys, but this was Dad’s first visit. We all enjoyed our visit. 

It is a modest museum, as befits a local boy who did well. Steinbeck grew up in Salinas and all of his most famous books borrow heavy from the environs. After he had grown, he moved to Monterey for a while, where he was when success found him. After that he was a man of the world, but at least in his writings, he always came home again.

Steinbeck Mural

Baby Mergansers

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Baby Mergansers

We made it to the cabin, convoying up with Bubs and Harry. Anne rode with them, while I flew solo. Except that I wasn’t alone, because I had an excellent audio book to keep me company. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance is a tough love appraisal of the electorate that voted for Trump. A conservative, Mr. Vance, recounts his eastern Kentucky family’s personal history that epitomizes the trail of tears that has befallen white blue-collar America over the past half-century. That he spares them nary a drop is in part a testament to his own Horatio Alger’s story. He is a Yale Law grad, a Marine and an Iraq War vet who has pulled himself up by his own boot straps. Rising in spite of a mom addicted who was addicted to ‘hillbilly heron’, This memoir has been hovering in the top ten on both Amazon’s and the New York Time’s bestseller lists. I ran out of road today and look forward to finishing the book tomorrow on the beach. 

Maisie Dobbs

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Reading Circle

Maisie Dobbs is a Jacqueline Winspear novel. The first in a series of now thirteen novels. This series is set in the inter-war years, but this first novel includes lengthy background that begins before the Great War and covers Maisie’s childhood. The story is a first person narrative, giving the reader an unfettered view of the titular character’s mind. Hers is a sober intellect that hints of a past. We begin with her first day on the job. It is 1929 and Maisie has opened shop as a psychologist / investigator in London’s fashionable west-end. Her first client is a well-to-do husband who suspects his wife of infidelity. It all sounds rather tawdry and droll, but before taking the case she extracts several promises to ensure that no matter the outcome some good will come of her efforts. As the investigation progresses we learn more about Maisie. She was a nurse during the war and the caretaker of her office building was a wounded soldier whom she helped by saving his leg. Theirs is a friendship that has sidekick written all over it. She quickly solves the question of the man’s wife, only to reveal a greater mystery. I dare not say much more, for fear of revealing too much and spoiling the story. I love stories from this period, in-between the two world wars. The characters have already endured horrible tragedies, but find themselves inexorably driven towards something much worse. In this first novel we don’t get there, but simply by reading the titles of subsequent stories in the series you know that is where we are all heading. I look forward to a lovely summer of beach reading.

Rock’em Sock’em Robots

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Rock'em Sock'em Robots

Rock’em Sock’em Robots

It was too cold today for a bicycle ride, so I went walk-about instead. When I walk, I like to listen to audio books through Hoopla. They help to exercise my mind, while I’m working on my body. Lately, I’ve been switching off between two different American history books. The first one is “1776” by David McCullough and the other one is “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America” by Nancy Isenberg. As the two titles infer McCullough’s book if focused upon a single year during the American Revolutionary War, while Isenberg’s is much more wide-ranging. It just so happens though that I have waded far enough into Isenberg’s book that now she too is dealing with the revolutionary time period.

McCullough hews much more closely to the sanitized public school version of American history than does Isenberg, but even he is not averse to illuminating some of the more unseemly aspects of this pivotal point in our country’s story. For example, he explains at length how if not for a seemingly inexhaustible supply of rum, Washington would not have been able to hold his rag-tag army together, during his prolonged siege of Boston. Meanwhile, Isenberg seems to revel in the seedier side of American history. Our founding fathers with all of their talk of freedom and equality, were little more than hypocrites. They were speaking only of their freedom and only the equality between them and their peers. The rest of us rabble be damned.

After having heard sullied twice-over our political origin story, I returned home, unplugging my ear buds and thereby also returned to the present. A perusal of today’s headlines reveals that little has changed in the intervening years. Our leaders are still vaingloriously treating we the people like trash. Through the mechanism of divide and conquer, we have been split neatly into two warring tribes, color-coded red and blue. We used to be blue and grey, but now that color scheme must be passé. Subdivided, we are left to furiously punch and poke each other like demented automatons, dancing around the ring like little marionettes at the direction of our puppet masters. I say enough. I am tired of all the political games, the incessant tit-for-tat, the unending one-upmanship. At the end of the day, none of it signifies anything and all of it affects even less.

A Man Called Ove

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Golden Ball Cactus

Golden Ball Cactus

Ove is a man who can be called prickly, bristly, thorny or just plain difficult. Ove is also the central character of author Fredrik Backman’s debut novel that has broken out to show the world that Swedish literature is more than just brooding, Scandinavian mysteries like ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’. ‘A Man Called Ove’ is a story where we meet a 59-year-old grouch who patrols his suburban neighborhood like a tough cop walking his even tougher beat. He enforces the rules, at least as he sees them. Jabbing his finger at almost anyone who crosses his path. Into Ove’s solitary world barge unbidden his newest neighbors. He meets them one morning, after they have backed their trailer over his mailbox. Led by its diminutive and very pregnant Iranian matriarch, these new neighbors almost immediately begin to teardown his walls of isolation. Parvaneh will always remember as the loveliest compliment he ever gave her, “Because you are not a complete twit.” As this story unfolds, almost like peeling an onion, we learn Ove’s backstory, how he became the bitter old man that he is now. It is a tale that will make you laugh, but also make you cry. I highly recommend this New York Times best seller. You won’t be sorry. I promise.