If you wanted to write an homage to Nora Ephron's beloved film When Harry Met Sally, where would you begin? Emily Henry sticks to a college meeting between two people with different perspectives, lives, and goals, from the same town in Ohio. (Henry lives in Cincinnati.) Despite their differences, they begin to take vacations together, slowly and reluctantly falling love. As Poppy gets her dream job working for a travel magazine, these vacations become more elaborate in upscale destinations. A graduate student and then a teacher, Alex gets a free ride, which he "pays for" in emotional, platonic investment. The novel details ten years of trips, interspersed with Poppy's present-day trip, designed to undo the damage to their friendship two years previously. I'm not a fan of jumbly timelines in a novel (or life!), but the effort to read in the order Henry wanted me to paid off. Henry has several novels, all good for romantic escapism. Like Nora.
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The subtitle of Heather Lende's book summarizes it very well--Family, Friendships, and Faith in Small-town Alaska. Lende, who is also a commentator for NPR, writes for a local newspaper, sharing in fifteen chapters the stories of her friends and neighbors. They are poignant, sometimes sad, sometimes laugh out loud funny.
Lende shares her own experience of being hit by a truck while riding her bicycle, which provides a framework for the book. The incident and her treatment and healing are referred to frequently. Readers will also learn of the Tlingit people of Alaska and of the land and wildlife. An Episcopalian, Lende also subtly shares her faith, sometimes expressed by singing while snowshoeing. I intend to find more of her books and read them all! Photo by Ljubomir Žarković on Unsplash (It's of Lake Bled in Slovenia) You may have seen the Best American...series, with annual volumes of poetry, essays, and short stories. Perhaps you've missed the travel writing series, from the same publisher, the same set-up as the other types of writing: a guest editor combs through pre-selected pieces (I assume thanks are due to interns reading huge piles of writing) to curate a variety of viewpoints and writers. As you may know, I'm happiest doing my traveling in a book. Real time isn't nearly so much fun or simple. When I saw this volume of 2021 travel writing, I picked it up at once. This is a particularly interesting volume, because travel was generally not happening during 2020 and 2021. If traveling and writing about it is your thing, it was a dreadful time. But this volume collects some pieces from hardy folk who traveled as soon as they were able, many of them to places I would never visit, enduring conditions I could not. And some of the essays are memory pieces or explanations of why one travels at all. Well worth your time, especially if you, too, have not been traveling lately. [Photo from National Cancer Institute, via Unsplash, even though cancer was not Elizabeth Zott's area of study.] Apple TV + is beginning a new series, Lessons in Chemistry, on October 13. There’s a reason for that—the novel, written by Bonnie Garmus, is terrific. Read it first; no doubt for television it will be mucked up. Set in the 1950s and 1960s, the book is a love story of two misfit chemists who find one another. It’s also about the challenges women of that era faced, especially if they wanted a career. The sexist, misogynistic world is on full display here. Elizabeth Zott, brilliant and beautiful, is attacked and abused for her desire to be recognized as a chemist, not simply as the host of an afternoon cooking show, “Supper at Six.” The main characters also include a dog, a TV producer, a Presbyterian minister, an anonymous donor, a young child, a kind neighbor, as well as Elizabeth's soul mate. I “lost” two days to reading this book, which was a great pleasure. I’ve started reading a contemporary romance series by Sarah Adams that rests on Audrey Hepburn movies to depict the romances of a family of three grown sisters and one brother in Rome, Kentucky. So the first one, concerning the love between the pie baker brother and a pop star, is entitled When in Rome, and alludes to Audrey Hepburn’s first film, Roman Holiday. The second Hepburn film referenced is Breakfast at Tiffany’s, in the novel Practice Makes Perfect, which details the love of the youngest of the family, who owns a flower shop, and a bodyguard from the famous pop star of the first novel. That's them on the cover, and yes, he has floral tattoos, the meaning of which is revealed in the story. Ann Patchett’s latest novel, Tom Lake, is another winner. It’s a story within a story; the frame is a cherry farm, where Lara is telling her three grown daughters—home because of covid, unable to get on with their lives—about her brief theatre career. The novel is richer for that enclosed story to rely so heavily on Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, with allusions as well to Anton Chekov’s Cherry Orchard. Readers get glimpses of each of three young women’s lives, and of their preoccupation with an actor their mother knew. The ending caught me unprepared, and yes, I did get teary. It’s a beautiful story. Shelby Van Pelt interweaves multiple story lines in this lovely novel, which includes a mystery about how and why her son died at eighteen. Now widowed, Tova cleans at an aquarium in fictional Sowell Bay, Washington—not because she needs money, but because she needs to be busy. She greets the fish and befriends an octopus, Marcellus, who provides brief journal entries throughout the novel. Another plot line concerns a thirty-year-old man who has been sabotaging his own life and blaming his drug-addicted mother and unknown father, both of whom abandoned him. I would not have expected to enjoy a book about an octopus, nor to cry at the end. Do yourself a favor and read this debut novel, then watch for Van Pelt’s next one! I don’t often read science fiction, nor do I wade through nearly 400-page books. But for Connie Willis’ latest, The Road to Roswell, I happily made an exception. Filled with funny and over-the-top characters, plus a possible romance between two of the [few] sane folks, it reminded me at some points of a French farce. There is an alien, Indy (yes, named for Indiana Jones), who resembles a tumbleweed, and the young woman who works trying to communicate with it. She also untangles its tentacles when it has a meltdown. The humans and Indy both have time deadlines to meet, and it all seems impossible. I’m confident that I’d understand this novel in a much richer way—and get more of the jokes—if I were a sci fi movie buff, and even more so if I watched Westerns, which also enter the plot. (We’re in New Mexico, after all, and Nevada, with Monument Valley as a major player.) Well worth the time to read a fun romp of a novel. I’ve gone for brain candy recently, so I thought I’d share two bits of librarian-type info about books in general to spare you the fluff. First item of trivia: Turn over the title page of any book; you’ll notice copyright information and a string of strange numbers following the letters ISBN. The letters are to be pronounced, as in CIA and FDR. They stand for International Standard Book Number, which is the way publishers, librarians, booksellers, and the Library of Congress can find a book. Each book has one; if a book appears in different formats, such as both hard cover and paperback or paperback and e-book, it has two different ISBNs. ISBNs come from the company Bowker, to which the Library of Congress has given this role. They are a monopoly; nowhere else in the U.S. can you get an ISBN, which costs $125.00 but is yours and yours alone, forever. (If you’re prolific, you can buy a ten-pack at a reduced rate.) Bowker says “The most important identifier your book can have is the ISBN.” Unless you are self-publishing, getting your ISBN is work a publisher will do for you. Bowker also publishes the definitive tome Books in Print. I assume it’s all online now, but back when I was a college library student worker, they were enormous gray books with teeny-tiny print, shelves and shelves of them waiting to be consulted. One of my jobs was to check any book orders from faculty to make sure the book was in print before we placed an order. The second area of arcane stuff: Where do library books come from? Libraries of any size do not order from Amazon or B&N, but from what’s called a jobber—essentially a middle company between publishers and libraries. They are not publishers; they’re the giant claw in a toy-grabbing machine, pulling each library or bookseller’s order from the various publishing houses and mailing it out. Two of the largest jobbers are Ingram or Baker and Taylor. (The latter is more interesting to me, because they have two Scottish fold library cats named after them, Baker and Taylor. They also use CATS as the acronym for their Children and Adult Services. When boxes from a jobber arrive, someone at the library or bookstore has the pleasure of opening the box and checking the order, inhaling that new book smell and the colorful book covers. It’s essentially Christmas, or any other gift-giving holiday, many times a year. Paris Letters is Janice MacLeod’s third book, her first memoir about her adventures in Paris, published in 2014. A Paris Year came out in 2017. In 2021, she published a collection of Paris Letters. The subtitle gives away the plot: “One woman’s journey from the fast lane to a slow stroll in Paris.” Unhappy with her job in copywriting, which had been but was no longer her dream job, she decides to buy herself time. She'd first thought it would be a sabbatical of sorts, not realizing there would be a life for her in Paris. Readers can walk with her, enjoying the scenery and the friends she makes as she struggles with improving her French. In addition, she discovers that illustrated letters of the scenes can be a moneymaker, and thus her career as an artist blossoms. The book is a charming, light read; unfortunately, the Paris letters in the book are in black-and-white, not color. |
What I’m ReadingI began working in libraries as a seventh grader, courtesy of scoliosis. My orthopedic surgeon wrote me a pass to miss gym class, so I began working in the school library to feed my love of reading. Even after my surgery to correct the curvature, I kept getting out of gym to work in my high school library and then in my college library (for pay, at last!).
So began my eventual career as a college reference librarian—after a detour into teaching high school English. Later I worked for an educational publisher before going back to libraries.
I have a reading and writing life now. I devour both fiction and nonfiction, and will tell you about some of my favorite reads, both old friends and new discoveries.
Here's some library-themed music to get you in the mood.
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