The art table showing no inspiration and the inside chores already checked off, what is there to turn to but books on a clouded day. Fortunately I have quite a pile ready...all kinds. Besides the stories they house, impatient to be released, they are marked by the way I have received them, and the whom received from, tales in themselves.
I'll begin with the one I've nearly finished...only a chapter to go, but the most recent to arrive, a Mother's Day gift from Joseph, who remembered that his friend Rachel and I had talked about it at dinner last week: A Really Strange and Wonderful Time, by Tom Maxwell, once a member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers whose music zippered open old and new listeners in the late 80's and 90's. It's about all the music in what was known as the Chapel Hill scene (or scenius, as one pundit put it), and it involved a few friends of mine whose adventures in and out of the music world mirrored what this town used to be like...a place to start anything, to try anything, to mix it up.
I wasn't here for most of those two decades, but Rachel rightly guessed that I'd find touchstones to interest me. The language of the book is music-business talk, mostly, about which I'm clueless, though it doesn't stop me trying to decode the culture just too young for my years. There is, in fact, such youth in it that Maxwell, who can't call himself young anymore either, still vibrates with it, and that endears me, a lover of the many different lingoes we choose to write and talk.
A lot of the way books come to me has that catalyst. This next one hasn't arrived yet...it's only in the first stages of writing, in fact...but lunch yesterday with John May gave me an enticing glimpse into his newest project, about the Algonquins of Virginia. It follows the one published this week, on the Jamestown colony. His excitement over his newest research and ways to describe this to-be novel, especially his fascination with the language and its various translations..."the literal ones are so elegant!"...I'm ready for it. (More amazing is the fact that though he and Alice have just moved house, a huge endeavor over the last four months, his study is up and running and producing text.)
It was OneTree books online that sent me to the library to pick up Anne Enright's Yesterday's Weather, chosen over her latest novel because I've been in the mood for good short stories these days, and the two I read last week, off my own bookshelf, weren't really doing it. But as I came up the B aisle, a yellow and orange cover caught my eye. and sure enough, this line on the inside front cover made me take Carol Birch's Orphans of the Carnival home, too:
Julia stood apart from the other carnival acts. She was fluent in English, French and Spanish, an accomplished musician...
That's how I first found the slim volume I have now taken out for the second time...Kaouther Adimi's Our Riches, about the famous bookshop and printery in war-torn Algiers who sent Camus out into the world and which epitomizes the tribulations and triumphs of small bookstores everywhere. Its storyteller fascinated me...so inclusive that it determines you along as if a hand on your elbow guided you from street to street. And yet listen to what I copied down that first reading:
There are some cities, and this is one, where any kind of company is a burden.
It's true enough...I know a few cities like that; though I had never been to Algiers, I have read that place now.
At home, all that yard work sent me to The Comfort of Crows, A Backyard Year, Margaret Renkl's calendar of garden insights. Randomly opening the book, I found "Praise Song for Solomon's Seal," at the end of week 11:
The purple-tinged stalks pop out of the ground with their foliage tightly furled, but very soon the leaves will open up like a teenager who has just learned she's beautiful, like a lonely person finally loved.
Oh, those bittersweet memories of Solomon Seal (and other) plantings I cannot keep the deer away from. I will read one chapter each week, beginning mid-May , and complete the whole next April.
My tables, floor and walls fill with books sent by friends, sometimes memoirs they or their spouses have written, but also books they have taken to heart. The most poignant of which latter was given me by a dear friend, but it isn't really a memoir at all: the award-laden, star-reviewed novel, Reparer les vivants by Maylis de Kerangal, translated from the French and called in English The Heart.
"I read The Heart in a single sitting," Atul Gawande notes in the beginning pages, but I have picked it up and put it down countless times after barely a page, its elegant, overriding, language ripping up my memories. I doubt I will ever finish it. Still, it stays on my table. And I am grateful for my friend's offering.
Outside, the little roadside library flourishes with things in, things out, so now and then I catch a good one there, wondering who left it, wondering what I can leave that entices in return. I found Maeve Binchy's A Week in Winter there. Short and Binchy, it served me a night's reading about one of my favorite subjects...turning a downtrodden building into a guest house. (Not that I have ever had the push to do that...it's the spirit of it, the dream of another, more energetic, life.)
Do you read as I do? Interestingly, of the two book groups I attend, I doubt the traditional one, whose monthly lists seem to come from the Times book list or other book groups, even old college reading lists, would take to any of these...indeed, they've regarded skeptically those I have recommended so far.
Fortunately, the non-traditional one, where each month we bring what has meant something of import to us, is the more curious, more intense, more questioning and discursive...it has no trouble ranging out anywhere. My kind of reading aloud among friends...through and between the lines.
Viva la libra!
a good read ;)
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