Browsed by
Category: books

Many Nations

Many Nations

Comments 0 Comment

Like many Americans these days I spend a fair amount of time wondering how we’ve become so polarized. It’s not just because we’re in an election season. It’s hard to read a newspaper, watch television or even carry on a conversation without noticing the rifts, which seem to grow deeper by the day.

Now that I’m reading American Nations by Colin Woodard, I have a better idea why this is happening. Although written before the most recent shenanigans (it was published in 2011), the book provides a history of, to use Woodard’s subtitle, “the eleven rival regional cultures of North America.” 

I’m learning about the Tidewater, where I live now, and Appalachia, where I grew up — although Woodward admits that the Bluegrass region of Kentucky (my original stomping grounds) might be considered a Tidewater enclave within Greater Appalachia.  And I’m gaining a better understanding of how the tolerant, anything-goes attitude I love about New York City harkens back to the founding of New Amsterdam and its mercantile roots.

We’re less of a melting pot than a large, lumpy stew. And Woodard is helping me understand why.

Library in the Forest

Library in the Forest

Comments 0 Comment

I see them everywhere these days, around the ‘hood and across this land. Along a street or in the woods. Little Free Libraries, they’re called, and what an excellent idea they are: a way to share books, to offer them gratis, to provide a new home for books that need one. (I can imagine the volumes waving their arms, shouting “take me”!)

Several of my walking routes have little free libraries along the way, but this one seems most ethereal and unlikely, situated as it is along a woods trail that sees fewer walkers than most. For that reason I’ve found at least one gem in its reaches. 

Yesterday, no such luck, but it was fun to look, and to savor the very idea of a library in the forest. 

Dear Friends

Dear Friends

Comments 0 Comment

Whenever I write a post these days I’m never far from a shelf of books. This was not the case when I worked in an office and would scramble to put some words down before my day officially began. Now I post at home, and there are walls of books throughout my house. 

I wonder sometimes what a younger person might say about these rows of books. My own children don’t count; they’ve grown up here. But someone else, someone efficient and technical who’s quite aware (as am I) that most of these books are available in digital or audio format and that in those formats they would take up a lot less space. 

Would they understand why the books themselves, the tattered covers, broken spines, dogeared pages, are so precious to me? Would they get that the books somehow become the ideas, characters and worlds they represent? Would they know how it feels to look to the left, as I’m doing now, and see not hundreds of pounds of paper and acres of felled trees, but a collection of dear friends?

Sacred Journey

Sacred Journey

Comments 0 Comment

When I read the obituaries of Frederick Buechner last week — he died August 15 at the age of 96 — I wondered how I had missed him all these years. He is the author of 39 books — novels, memoirs, sermons and other nonfiction — and is known for encouraging people to listen to their lives. 

“Listen to what happens to you everyday,” he said, because it is “a kind of praying.” The “hurly-burly of life” often drowns out that sound, he continues. But for that reason, we must pay even closer attention.We find our purpose, he wrote, in the place where “deep gladness meets the world’s need.”

Some spend most of their lives looking for this place, this intersection. Others find it early on. And some, of course, never find it at all. 

But it’s good to learn about one who not only found it for himself, but who took the time to share it with others. I’ve already ordered one of Buechner’s books, the library being short on his work. The Sacred Journey arrives next week. 

The City Beautiful

The City Beautiful

Comments 0 Comment

In one of the last chapters of Devil in the White City, the engrossing nonfiction narrative of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, author Erik Larson writes, “The fair taught men and women steeped only in the necessary to see that their cities did not have to be dark, soiled, and unsafe bastions of the strictly pragmatic. They could also be beautiful.”

The fair gave common folks a glimpse of what cities could be and inspired artists to create beautiful fantasy cities of their own. Walt Disney’s father, Elias, worked on the fair and its beauty rippled down to his son, Walt, who created his own “White City” in the Magic Kingdom. Author L. Frank Baum visited the fair and it informed his vision of Oz. 

Though some critics complained that the World’s Fair, with its emphasis on the neoclassical, actually delayed a more uniquely American architectural style, the pendulum seems to have swung around on that point. “The fair awakened America to beauty and as such was a necessary passage that laid the foundation for men like Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe,” Larson notes. 

Daniel Burnham, the architect who created the fair, later devoted his expertise to helping real cities attain the sweep and majesty of the White City. He drew up plans for parts of Chicago, as well as for Cleveland and San Francisco, and he helped fully realize Pierre L’Enfant ‘s vision of Washington, D.C. 

It was beauty that drove this quest, the desire to replicate the grand cities of Europe. A noble occupation, I think, and one to admire.

Topology

Topology

Comments 0 Comment

Last week’s get-together meant I focused more on family than landscape, but on walks and short drives to beaches and beauty spots I laid eyes once again on a landscape I love.

What is it that inclines us to a certain place? I think it has to do with what Annie Dillard calls “topology … the dreaming memory of land as it lies this way and that” — a quotation that serves as the frontispiece to this blog.

Dillard was describing her hometown of Pittsburgh in this passage from An American Childhood. But topology — the study of a region as defined by its topography — can apply to any place that strikes our fancy, that holds within it the balance of sky and meadow, shade and sun that makes our heart sing.

These are our places of memory, whether we’ve been to them hundreds of times … or only once.

Accidental Tourist

Accidental Tourist

Comments 0 Comment

A novel that I still remember years after reading it is Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist. The protagonist writes travel books for people who find themselves in a place they didn’t expect to be. Yesterday, I found myself in a similar position: stuck in Charlotte, North Carolina, for the night. 

I was not alone. Hundreds of stranded passengers lined up at the American Airlines kiosk, frantically searched for hotel rooms, a task made more difficult by the fact that Garth Brooks was performing and there were basically no rooms in town. 

Luckily, I snagged the last room available in a marginal motel in an outer burb,  found a taxi willing to take me there, and slept on a queen mattress rather than the airport floor. 

Which meant that today I was an accidental tourist in Matthews, North Carolina.  

Trodden Paths

Trodden Paths

Comments 0 Comment

For more weeks than I care to admit, I’ve been reading Jose Saramago’s Journey to Portugal. Saramago makes it clear that he is not a tourist; indeed, Portugal is his native land. But he is a traveller, and there is scarcely a hamlet that he doesn’t cover in this tome. 

I picked it up because we are going to Portugal this summer (in a couple of days, in fact), and I thought the words of a Nobel Prize winner might be good ones to take along. 

The ones that strike my fancy now, though, apply not just to Portugal but to any journey. He uses them to describe the Roman ruins in the city of Evora. 

The paths trodden by men are only complicated at first sight. When we look more closely, we can see traces of earlier feet, analogies, contradictions that have been resolved or may be resolved at some future date, places where suddenly languages are spoken in common and become universal.

 “Traces of earlier feet…” — that’s an image I won’t forget. 

Resilience

Resilience

Comments 0 Comment

In her new book Sanctuary, Emily Rapp Black explores the concept of resilience. As part of this task, she talks with the editor of a book called Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust.

Black learns that resilience is not an item on a to-do list. It is a part of us, as long as we have the agency to express it.

The children whose diaries are featured in this book found that agency through keeping their diaries. “The journal writers made it clear that writing was the path to maintaining any agency at all, which in this context was life,” Black writes. “To do creative work was to be — and feel — alive.”

The children who kept these diaries were exposed to unimaginable horrors. Yet they found the will to live through scribbling words on a page. I take great hope from that.

A Pencil Post

A Pencil Post

Comments 0 Comment

I’m thinking this morning of the pencil. The pencil I first used as a young school girl. A pencil fat and soft-leaded, a purgatory in which I would need to exist until I graduated to a cartridge pen. 

The humble pencil, which author Wendell Berry uses for correspondence, saying that he no longer has the courage to write unless he can erase. (Berry long ago eschewed the computer, which does pretty well in the erasure department, sometimes when you least expect or want it to.) 

The historical pencil, produced in a factory in Concord, Massachusetts, owned by the father of Henry David Thoreau. 

The mechanical pencil, which is not my writing implement of choice but is a dandy tool for making notes to myself in a calendar, especially if it has a good eraser.

The pencil, in short, has much to recommend itself, and is certainly worth a post—though not, of course, a penciled one.