Share a Bookshelf Wednesday

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I'm a little bored this morning, and that got me to thinking about one of my favorite things to do...browse bookshelves wherever and whenever I find them. I love watching television interviews of various "talking heads" mainly to freeze-frame them long enough to study the bookshelves behind them. And I love looking at pictures in magazines to do the same because you learn a whole lot about a person by checking out the titles they own and take pride in. Of course, some folks are not above "salting" their shelves in order to portray the precise image they are striving for, so the impression given is not always a true one. But it's still fun to take a look.

In that spirit, I'm sharing three of the thirty-two shelves in my study. If you enjoy browsing them, let me know and I'll share more shelves in a few days. 

The Joys and Frustrations of Digital Libraries During a Pandemic

I got sidetracked on my library's website about two hours ago and have just now managed to break free. I initially went to the site hoping to find an audiobook that might appeal to me, but that didn't happen. I've not had much luck with the last three or four audiobooks I've tried, so it's probably me. I'm a little picky and hard to please right now.

I did find a bunch a books that I would love to read, most of them having just been published in the last two or three months. Fifteen of them, in fact. But when I tried to check them out, I found that only one of them was actually available for check-out. The Other Wes Moore was written when its author learned there was another man by the same name in his city who is living a life 180 degrees from the one the author has known. The author is a Rhodes Scholar, a veteran, a businessman, and a White House Fellow. The other Wes Moore is serving a life sentence in prison. Both men are black. 

The other fourteen books are now on hold for anywhere from ten weeks to six months plus, most of them in the latter category. It appears that the Covid-19 pandemic has caused a  mass run on library e-books and audiobooks now that physical books are off-limits for the duration of the outbreak. I'm really, really hoping that the pandemic will be under control before the six-month availability estimates are tested. Surely, we will be able to get back inside a library before  then...please, say you agree. Among the titles I've put on hold are Anne Tyler's brand new one, Readhead by the Side of the Road, This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger, The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, and My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite. Not all of the requested books are new, even the older ones have a wait-time of at least four months.

But there's some good news, too, and some of you may want to take a look at your own library systems to see if this works for you. The library is offering dozens, if not a few hundred, relatively current magazines for downloading and reading on various electronic devices. The magazines can be kept for only 14 days, but the best part of this is that the number of copies available is unlimited, so there is no hold-list to suffer through. The magazines are immediately available to you. I downloaded the April 2020 edition of Macworld and can't wait to get into it later this afternoon (so now I have yet another another thing to distract me from my regular reading). 

And, I've mentioned this before, but if your library is part of the Kanopy service, there are dozens and dozens of really good movies available for free on the Kanopy app. Normally, a library system allows something like 4-6 movies per month, per patron, to be streamed, but right now because of the pandemic de jour, there is no limit on how many movies you can watch. So...check it out.

So there you have it. Libraries are very frustrating right now...and very, very rewarding. And, two "verys" are better than one very. 

Covid-19 Journal - Week 5 Begins

Thanks to what Diane is doing over on Bibliophile by the Sea, I've come to realize that our blogs are a useful tool to keep track of how we coped with this period of isolation, something that we can look back on a few years down the road for a reminder or two of what it was like. So, using Diane's basic format, I plan to start off each new week with a summary of what life is like for me in my Houston suburb. 

Virus Stats from Johns Hopkins:

In the last week,

Worldwide cases increased from 1,272,115 to 1,846,963,
United States cases increased from 337,274 to 555,398, and
Texas cases went from 7,231 with 138 deaths to 13,741 with 286 deaths.

Outside:

I was surprised this morning to find that a mini cold front came through the area sometime during the night. It's almost noon as I write this, and the temperature is only 57 degrees. That's a huge drop from the 90 degrees we reached on Saturday. According to the weather app, we got down to 51 early this morning and the high will be 66. I see that we can expect lows of around 48 degrees the next two mornings - and that just seems weird.

The painters showed up early this morning to prepare the outside of the house for a fresh coat of paint, and it was a bit of a jolt to walk out into this sunny and windy surprise of a morning. It most certainly woke me up. 

Reading/Watching/Listening to:

I'm reading about 60% of the number of pages per day that I was reading before all this started, and part of the reason for the drop is that I'm watching more movies and listening to a whole lot more music than I was before. I've even gone back to just reading one book at a time, something I haven't done for years.

I'm about 25% of the way through Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles, a really good piece of historical fiction set in Texas just after the conclusion of the Civil War. Jiles is a wonderful writer and I'm counting on her to help me break my reading slump. Next up for me is The Case of the Negligent Nymph, a throwback read, something I probably read decades ago when I was really into Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason books. It will be interesting to see if the Gardner books pass the test of time. The Jiles book is to be released tomorrow (April 14), and the Gardner book is from 1950.

I've been searching for "literary" movies a lot lately, and I managed to find a few good ones last week with the help of Epix (we are getting a free preview right now that ends on 4/16), Kanopy, Showtime (recorded from a free preview weekend), and Netflix. A Brilliant Young Mind is a British movie about an autistic child who proves to be a mathematical genius but is suffering emotional problems because of the tragic loss of his father in an automobile accident.

The other three movies are all based on books, two of which I read a few years ago.  Sarah's Key was a huge book for Tatiana de Rosnay back in 2007, and it was followed by a movie version in 2010 that does a good job of representing the novel. The concentration camp scenes are sometimes difficult to watch, but in a way, this is a beautiful movie. The Virgin Suicides is based on the 1993 debut novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, an author who writes some really unusual books. The 1999 movie version seems a little dated but that's not a huge

problem because the movie is set in the 1970s. The Best of Enemies is based on Osha Gray Davidson's 2006 book about a racial confrontation in Durham, North Carolina, over school segregation. Hard as this one may be to believe, it is based on a true story - with video of the actual people involved shown as part of the closing credits to prove it. 

Listening To:

I've listened to the occasional bookish podcast during all of this, but it's also been great fun to revisit some of the music I haven't listened to in way too long. I've been spending time with lots of country classics, including music from George Jones, George Strait, Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam, and Johnny Cash. Roots music. And for me, just about perfect for the times.

In the Kitchen:

Life goes on. The biggest difference in our lives regarding meals is that I'm cooking more of them outside on the grill than before. Part of that is a function of the better weather we've been having, but we're also finding the grilled meals to be a nice change from the kitchen-cooked ones. It's still hit and miss at the local groceries, but I'm finding about 90% of what we're out of when I make my weekly scavenger hunt to refill the pantry and freezers. It's slowly getting better, however, even though I'm still finding it difficult to find our preferred brands of peanut butter, flour, corn meal, etc. - and some cuts of meat seem to have completely disappeared. 

The Outside World:

No matter that we are all trying to keep our heads down right now in hopes that we are helping the situation, the outside world keeps intruding. We discovered a plumbing problem late Friday night that had to be taken care of on Saturday morning, meaning that a masked plumber spent a couple of hours with us. And today, the painter we contracted with prior to the shutdown began work on the outside of the house - with minimal contact to all. Last week, I also had to pick up the license plates for the car I bought in early March, meaning a trip to the dealer where I had to wait for 15 minutes for someone to figure out where they put them. 

The best laid plans...

Westwind - Ian Rankin

In 1990, when Westwind was first published, Ian Rankin had written only one of his now famous John Rebus novels and was working on the second. The book didn’t exactly make much of a splash. As Rankin puts it in his introduction to this 2019 edition, it may have been published but, “Not that anyone noticed. There was one hardcover printing, one paperback, and one in large format for readers with limited sight. It didn’t sell in the USA and no foreign-language publisher wanted it.” Even Rankin could not “muster” much enthusiasm for the book. Then, according to Rankin, someone on Twitter convinced him that the book was not as bad as he remembered it to be. After re-reading the novel for himself, Rankin realized that Westwind paralleled much of today’s geopolitical situation and, more importantly, that he had enjoyed reading it.

Thus was born last year’s slightly revised version of Westwind, of which Rankin says:

            “I’ve given the original printed text a polish, hopefully ridding it of those flawed sentences and scenes. A few words have been added here and there, while others have been removed or altered, but it is essentially the same book that it always was, just thirty years older and a little wiser…”

Westwind is set in an alternate reality 1990 in which the US has decided to remove its troops from Europe under the assumption that it’s time for Europe to take responsibility for its own defense. Some British citizens are thrilled to see the backside of American troops; others fear what might happen in their absence. As the end-date for the removal of the last troops approaches, tensions are high and protesters on both sides of the issue are determined to be heard. Communication satellites are circling the earth making life better for everyone – but that’s not all they are doing. Everyone and everything that happens on the ground is fair game. There are no more secrets.

Ian Rankin

In the midst of all the turmoil, an American space shuttle crashes upon its return to Earth, killing all of the American astronauts on board. The only survivor is the British astronaut who was only on the flight in the first place as a courtesy to the key American ally. Now the question is why rescuers had to pry the fingers of one of the dead Americans from around the Brit’s neck before they could remove him from the shuttle remains. Meanwhile, at a British ground-control center, Martin Hepton, whose job it is to monitor one of the most advanced communication satellites in Western Europe watches helplessly as the center completely loses contact with it. The satellite is unresponsive to ground-control operators for almost four minutes and only resumes contact just when everyone feared it was lost forever.

Nothing like this has ever happened before, and one of Hepton’s colleague’s has reason to believe that it was not an accident this time either. Unfortunately, the man only has time to hint to Hepton that something is very strange before he disappears. Now, Hepton, believing that his friend is in trouble, wants answer – and he starts asking the kind of questions that a whole lot of very dangerous people don’t want him asking.

Bottom Line: Westwind is an enjoyable spy-thriller right up until it reaches its final climax. The characters are likable, and it’s easy to root for them as they try to figure out what is going on before they are all killed by super-spies and assassins from around the world. The book’s big flaw is how much it begins to resemble a James Bond movie as it approaches the big-reveal part of its story. Just as in a typical Bond script, as soon as the villains seem to have custody of all the good guys, they can’t resist boasting in detail about their mad plot and how it all works. Rather than eliminating their rivals immediately, they prefer to explain what will happen (in great detail, mind you) after they kill them. The unfortunate effect of this approach is that it pushes Westwind from far-fetched thriller category into cartoon category, making it not so thrilling after all.

Olive, Again - Elizabeth Strout

In the last few years, Elizabeth Strout has quietly worked her way onto my list of favorite authors. Strout has now published seven books in all, but I had not read her work until I picked up The Burgess Boys, a book I found almost stunning in its insights into the human soul, in early 2013. That put Strout on my radar for good and resulted in me reading her next three books (My Name Is Lucy Barton, Anything Is Possible, and Olive, Again) almost as soon as they were published. Strout is not a particularly prolific author, so the good news is that I still have her first three novels, including her 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning Olive Kitteridge, waiting to be read.

Olive, Again is a collection of thirteen chronologically-ordered short stories that revisit the life and world of one of the most memorable fictional characters of the twenty-first century, Olive Kitteridge. Olive is front and center in some of the stories, and in others she makes only a cameo appearance or two, but all of the stories take place in and around Crosby, Maine, the seaside town that Olive calls home. Even the Burgess boys (of the novel of the same name) and their sister have a story of their own that shows that although they are older, they haven’t really changed all that much.

The stories age Olive another dozen years or so, bringing her well into her eighties by the end of the book. Not surprisingly, Olive is still the same feisty, blunt-speaking spirit that she’s always been, but as the years go by she is starting to second-guess herself a little. She’s even making a conscious effort to treat people better than she has in the past, something that does not come easy to her.

Strout prepares us for a different side of Olive in the book’s very first story, “Arrested,” a story in which we meet Jack, Olive’s eventual second husband. Jack yearns to reconnect with Olive because he misses what he calls her “honesty,” a quality that others are more likely to call her rudeness. Jack just may be the perfect man for Olive at this stage in their lives. Only time will tell – and it does. Many of the following stories chronicle the aging process in Olive, and how she adapts, or doesn’t adapt, to each stage of losing a little more of the physical and mental prowess she once prided herself on. But there are also stories about other people, many of them former students in Olive’s seventh-grade math class, who live in or visit little Crosby, Maine. Regardless of who they are now and what they are doing, almost all of them know or remember Olive well. She was that kind of a force in Crosby.

My favorite comic moment in the stories appears in one called “Exiles” during which a New York visitor has just purchased a small painting at a Crosby street fair so that she doesn’t appear to be a snob to her sister-in-law. That’s just when Olive (in a brief cameo appearance) walks by:

            “As Helen took the painting and turned to go, she bumped into a tall big old woman who was saying loudly to the man she was with, ‘God, have I seen enough of this crap! Come on, Jack.”

Helen is briefly introduced to Olive, and as Olive leaves this happens:

            “The woman (Olive) said, ‘Well.’ She pointed a finger at the painting Helen held. ‘You enjoy that,’ and she turned around, waiving a hand over her head as she and the man walked past the two of them.”

Elizabeth Strout

Olive, Again, though is not a comedic look at aging unless the reader has a very dark sense of humor. Rather, it is a frank look at what the sudden realization that each day is likely to be a little more difficult than the one that preceded it does to a person. Olive Kitteridge is a fighter, a very strong woman who has never backed down from anything or anyone in her life. But even Olive is struggling as she learns to cope with what is, and what is still to come. She is getting there, though, even if she is learning some painful things about herself, like the admittance she makes to herself at the end of a story called “Motherless Child:”

            “But she saw behind her closed eyes the house, and inside her was a shiver that went through her bones. The house where she had raised her son – never, ever realizing that she herself had been raising a motherless child, now a long, long way from home.”

Or this realization from “Friend:”

            “It was herself, she realized, that did not please her.”

…

            “I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.”

It seems that the more that Olive learns about herself, the less she understands about herself and how she has impacted the lives of everyone around her, be it for the good or for the bad, for so long.

Bottom Line: Olive, Again is as brilliant an account of the aging process and its impact on people’s opinion of themselves as it is a final accounting of the life of its main character, a woman no one will ever forget if they have met her on the pages of Olive Kitteridge or Olive, Again.

Bookish Odds & Ends for Those Long Coronavirus Nights

Time to share a few bookish odds & ends I've enjoyed reading in the last few days (complete with links back to the original source articles):

Capitol Hill Books

1. I suppose this is not "legal" in about 90% of the country right now because of all the "Stay Home" orders out there, but what a great idea this is. What used-book bookstore fan would not enjoy an hour inside a bookstore all by themself?Washington D.C.'s Capital Hill Books recently allowed its patrons to book one-hour appointments to do exactly that. To get an idea of just how great this would be, take a look at Slate's "One Last Trip to the Bookstore." 

"I started on the first floor - history, mostly. When I found a book I wanted to buy, I merrily tossed it to the floor; the store was mine, after all, and I didn't need to carry my growing pile along with me today. I ran my glove-clad finger across spines like a stick across a fence, stopping at each title that seemed even a little bit interesting."

2. How about a reminder of how good it was back in the good old days before the word "quarantine" was on the tip of everyone's tongue...you know, all the way back to mid-March 2020.  Bill Hayes describes heading downtown to buy a book. Can you imagine? Read "Walking in the City Before the Bookstores Closed" at this Lit Hub link. 

"No one was allowed inside - Troy was sequestered behind the counter and Miriam was on the floor, standing halfway from the entrance - but if you'd 'Just call out the title of the book' you were looking for (or the author, or the genre), they'd find it for you. And they did!"

3. One Michigan library figures that your dogs are probably just as bored as you are right now. After all, they are not seeing their friends either. To fix that, the Ann Arbor District Library hosted a virtual-park event for dogs last Saturday. Rich Retyl, the library's AADL communications manager put it this way, " I think dogs are feeling a little left out." (Honestly, I think they are all in dog-heaven right now, trapped inside with their owners almost 24-7 for the foreseeable future.) Here's the "videoconference for dogs" scoop from MLive.com.

4. From the Guardian, comes a gathering of novelists who want to help you choose "books to inspire, uplift, and offer escape." Contributors include Hilary Mantel, Marlon James, Kazuo Ishiguro, Mark Haddon, Ayòbámi Adébáyò, Colm Tóibín, and a host of others. If you're looking for something to read during our more-or-less national confinement, this is a good place to start: "Novelists pick books..."

5. Wondering how authors are coping with our new stay-at-home culture? Well, wonder no more because this article from The Bookseller paints a pretty clear picture for you. And it's not a pretty one. Click here for "Lockdown: the author's perspective."

"Many authors live in a perpetual state of anxiety. Anxiety our books won't sell. Anxiety we won't get a new deal. 
Anxiety our reviews will suck.

So it goes without saying the past few weeks have taken those anxieties to a whole new level."

I hope you find some of these links interesting, and that they offer a little bit of a change-of-pace to the rest of your day. Hard to believe this is just the beginning of the fourth week of all this voluntary house-sitting for our own houses. Keep reading. Keep smiling. Stay well.