June 2018 Reads

A roundup of books I read over the last month.

May 2018 Reads

April 2018 Reads
March 2018 Reads
February 2018 Reads
January 2018 Reads

Once again another month has nearly gone by and I'm just now posting the previous month's reading list. At least this time I have the excuse of having had other things to blog about.

Nonfiction
Last month's nonfiction selections included two books by Caitlin Shetterly: Modified and Made for you and Me. I plan to write a profile of Shetterly for Literary Mama in the near future, so I won't write too much about them here. I went to a reading of Modified last spring and it took me more than a year to pick it up and read it, because I was scared of learning more about a dread subject (genetically modified food) than I already know. Shetterly handles this difficult subject with open-mindedness, grace, and humor. Of course that doesn't make  what we're doing to our food systems any less terrifying. The other book is a memoir about the year she and her husband moved from Maine to California to make a go as freelance writer and photographer and were hit by pregnancy (with violent symptoms) and the recession, along with a lot of other sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad, often scary and weird events. It's funny, while I was reading I was thinking, "Recession? When was that?" Not because we're so wealthy we don't notice the financial ups and downs that affect the little people, but because where we live is so perennially depressed that blips in the worldwide economy hardly make a difference.

My other nonfiction book for June was Wind in Rock by Ann Zwinger. I've had it on my shelf for a very, very long time, but finally got around to reading it because it's on the list for my Naturalists' Book Club for our next meeting. I really love Zwinger's writing and the more I read the more I love. It can be a little slow, and there's little drama, but her quiet observations of the natural world (and occasional dips into the author's personal world), with an artist's eye, are soothing and insightful and lovely. This one is about five canyons that feed into the San Juan River, on the Colorado Plateau, one of my favorite places. The book gave me a little imaginary vacation there (and inspiration to go and travel more).

Fiction
Okay, I admit it. I'm obsessed—with hunting down and reading Barbara Michaels/Elizabeth Peters books. I've been to something like seventeen used bookstores and library book sales in more than a dozen towns around Maine. It's kind of fun to keep an eye out for little hole-in-the-wall bookstores when I'm traveling around for other purposes, and it's nice to have a mission when in these places, because they can be kind of overwhelming (and it stops me buying large stacks of books I don't need). Last month I read numerous finds: The Seventh Sinner by Elizabeth Peters and Someone in the House, Search the Shadows, The Dark on the Other Side, and The Dancing Floor, all by Barbara Michaels. (Of course you know by now that Peters and Michaels are the same person. As Barbara Mertz wrote in her bio: "The ostensible reason for using pseudonyms is that readers need to distinguish the various types of books written by a single author; Mertz writes nonfiction on archaeology, Michaels writes thrillers, many with a supernatural element, and Peters focuses on mystery suspense. I find the various names a horrible nuisance, but apparently readers do see a difference between the productions of these personae.") 

Search the Shadows was the first book by MPM (that's Mertz/Peters/Michaels) that I read back in high school. It inspired in me a short-lived aspiration to become an Egyptologist (if only I'd stuck to that plan! I could spend winters in the sunny--and salubrious, as Amelia Peabody would say--climes of Egypt rather than cold, dark Maine). I remember being even then somewhat disturbed by the father-figure romance (this is an element that appears in several MPM books: a surly, older man—in this case, a friend of her long-dead mother and candidate for possible father—turns out to be hero and romantic interest; weird but who knows what goes through the heads of writers).

Read-Aloud

And you'll be glad to know that my two younger children share my obsession and we're still plowing through the Amelia Peabody series, having read He Shall Thunder in the Sky (in which the Master Criminal's true identity is revealed at long last) last month. We're nearing the end of the series and the boys have already decided that I'll read the first book (which I skipped over when we started the series) when we've finished. I have a feeling they'll try to trick me into reading them *all* again after that.

The Sparrow's Song

Yes, I know this isn't a white-throated sparrow.

I have a new essay up today at The Sunlight Press, called "The Sparrow's Song."

It's about babies and birds and the relentless march of time, because of course.

This is one of those essays with a long, long gestation period—my first draft is dated October 2013, and I was thinking about it for years before I started writing. The piece went through many iterations over that time, starting out in the standard first-person and one point measuring 2500 words long, evolving to the second-person with field-guide-style interruptions and slimming down to the current 1000 words. Along the way, it took more than a few failed test flights to various journals. The final piece is a testament to persistence, flexibility, and the all-important delete key.

If you get a chance to read it, here, please let me know what you think!

Kitchen Refresh

When we built our house, I wanted my kitchen painted a nice, bright, primary yellow. To that end, I chose a paint called "rain slicker."

While I loved the bright, cheery color, I had some doubts from the start about whether it was the right choice. For one thing, the color did not quite match the more mustardy hue of our tile. For another, it was only available in a matte finish, which is not idea for either a kitchen or a house with kids, because it does not wash so easily.



I was happy enough with the color to live with it for a good 15 1/2 years, but this summer I decided it was finally time for a refresh—still yellow, but a shade a little more toward the golden end of the spectrum.

C and I spent two Sundays moving furniture, washing dishes, and sanding, washing, and painting walls, which is pretty remarkable considering how much durn stuff was in the way. (That turquoise cabinet up there? It weighs somewhere around a metric ton—and it's never once been moved, as evidenced by the dust and M's drawings from that time, before we had the cabinet, when I left him alone with a pencil and a stack of newsprint when he was one.) Not to mention the sheer volume of dishes that had to be moved, and in many cases washed (it gets dusty up on those shelves).


The color I chose to replace rain slicker is called "butter cream" but I prefer to call it "National Geographic" because it is the exact color of the yellow border around a National Geographic magazine.



It could also be called black-eyed Susan or goldenrod or any of a number of bright, summery flowers that are just now coming into bloom and have that rich, golden, buttery yellow hue.

It's also the exact color of the original Fiestaware yellow (not a coincidence). So I made a special display of most of my vintage yellow Fiesta (plus one modern cake plate because I'm running out of room for standing up my big plates and platters) to celebrate.

Certain people in this house don't see much difference between the old paint and the new, but that's because they lack a sensitive appreciation of that sort of thing (certain other people claim to hate yellow, which is blasphemy). I think it's bright and cheery, not to mention new and clean and eggshell finish, therefore washable. So I'm pleased.

(Long) Weekend Things ~ Fourth of July

We usually stick close to home for the Fourth of July, but this year C's step-siblings were in town, so we headed up to camp for a few days.

But first, of course, we hit our town's parade, which was somewhat diminished due to new safety rules (no uninsured floats; no throwing candy from moving vehicles).




The rules didn't stop the fire truck brigade.




Nor the annual walking social justice float.



The fourth was hot and sticky, as I think it was all over the world, so afterward we found our way to a new swimming hole (which was an improvement over our original plan of running through the sprinklers). Afterward, we had a low-key cookout in the back yard.



I had thought this would be the year we finally made it to a firework show, but my brother-in-law showed up with a load of backyard fireworks just in time to save our children from a) having to leave the house and b) having to share space with strangers. Somewhere between the swimming hole and the cookout, the auto focus on my regular camera lens quit working, so no photos of the fireworks.

The next day, we headed up to camp, where the weather was perfect for soaking in the lake, canoeing, cooking out, and just general relaxicating.




We arrived home on Saturday, just in time for C and I to head out to a gala and performance of Pride@Prejudice (yes, the @ is intentional, and no, I did not even notice it when I bought the tickets; it refers to a device—literal and figurative, as in the actors made use of cell phones, laptops, etc.--the playwrite used for clever asides that explained some ambiguities to the audience and summarized bits of the narrative to scrunch the story into play length).

I was so excited about the gala (period costume optional), that I made a semi-regency dress to wear. I say semi because I bought a period-style pattern, but, taking one look at it realized it was way more complicated than I wanted to deal with so instead adapted the design of a blouse I have with an empire waist and raglan sleeves.

Beach Day

This is the first summer in four years that we don't have a big vacation planned. No three week road trip. No five-hundred mile hiking trip. And I've been feeling kinda sorry for myself. Whenever anyone asks what we're doing this summer, I sigh and say, "Nothing."

We do have a camping trip with friends planned, and a few days at in-laws' camp, but nothing epic, and I'd pretty much resigned myself to a summer spent puttering around the house, tackling some projects we've been thinking about for a long time. One of those, is painting the kitchen, and I would have spent all of the last two weekends doing that, except I was persuaded (with little difficulty) to attend a bird club trip the first of the two Saturdays and we were invited to E and Z's best friend's birthday party—at the beach—this past Saturday.

My kids are some kind of mutants who, whenever I say, "Let's go the beach," say "No! I don't want to. I hate the beach." But when a friend is involved, they change their tune. So we piled in the car and trundled off the to beach on what promised to be a hot, sunny, beachy kind of day, and hit the waves.

Sitting here, writing in 90 degree heat, 900 percent humidity, I feel cool just looking at this photo.

And it was pretty spectacular. It doesn't mean I won't have to coax and cajole them next time I want to go to the beach, but at least they admitted to having had fun.

In other coastal news, my essay "The World in their Hands," which takes place in part at the beach, and which appeared in The Maine Review last year, has been republished on Nature Writing for your reading pleasure.