Sunday Reading with
THEBOOKJEANIE
Just relaxing in the garden with a few titles picked up at the Tucson Book Festival. Once again it was an amazing event with the UofA campus filled with over 100,000 book lovers in attendance. Authors as diverse as Sandra Day O'Connor, Andrew Weil, and Scott Turow filled the lecture halls, classrooms, and tents on the vast lawn of the mall, accompanied by music, food, and festivities. Thank you to the UofA and the many local businesses and non-profit groups that sponsor this free event in Tucson each year, giving our community another reason to be proud of the richness of the old pueblo.
Vincent and the Berenstain Bears
Tucson Book Festival - 2014
“Books fall open, you fall in, delighted where you’ve never been;
hear voices not once heard before, reach world on world through door on door;
find unexpected keys to things locked up beyond imaginings.
What might you be,
perhaps become,
because one book is somewhere?
Some wise delver into wisdom, wit, and wherewithal has written it.
True books will venture,
dare you out,
whisper secrets, maybe shout
across the gloom to you in need,
who hanker for a book to read.”
~ David McCord
Some new books to consider. . .
Anna Quindlen, writing the weekly column Public and Private, gained the devotion and respect of New York Times readers with her fresh observations of life in the 80's, taking the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. Three years later she retired from journalism to devote herself to writing fiction, a career shift that resulted in the critical success of novels that seem to be an extension of her critical eye for the fractures in our society, such as One True Thing and Black and Blue. With her recently published novel, Still Life with Breadcrumbs, Quindlen presents us with a portrait of a woman who rose above her domestic life to achieve success as a photographer, but not at all comfortable with her fame and feminist label. Her most famous photograph, reproduced on posters and postcards in the 70's, depicts the remains of a dinner party, the domestic detritus that cluttered her kitchen counter one evening and seemed to symbolize the dicotomy of the modern woman. Now in her sixties with her aging parents to support and filmmaker son frequently in need of a loan, Rebecca Winter realizes that the royalities from her famous photographs are drying up and that she must make some drastic changes in her lifestyle. Leasing out the Central Park apartment that she bought when times were good and her marriage intact, Rebecca calculates that she can live on that income if she pares her life to the bare minimum while living in a dilapidated cottage in upstate New York. Quindlen's talent in this latest novel is to reveal the exquisite ordinary details of life with wit and charm while following Rebecca as she determinedly moves ahead with her plan to take care of all those whom she loves. Predictably, her plan proves to be flawed but the unexpected turns that her life takes will keep you reading - much recommended.
For a young man who grew up in a privileged Pakistani family and was educated at the American School in Lahore before moving on to take degrees at Princeton and Harvard, Mohsin Hamid shows remarkable knowledge and empathy for the struggles of most Pakistanis coming of age amidst the grinding poverty and political corruption of his country. A second-person narrative is hard to pull off but Hamid carries his character, a nameless "you," effortlessly through this subtle parody of a self-help guide to navigating the opportunites offered by a "rising Asia."
Escaping the poverty of his rural village by making his way to a city not unlike Lahore, our character survives by his innate sense of opportunity and his determination to be successful at whatever task, no matter how menial, that he attempts. Hard work and sheer perseverance pay off in the end as he starts his own business of providing clean bottled water to the city but faces the usual obstacles of graft and corruption that he struggles to circumvent. At heart a dreamer, "you" cannot forget the beautiful village girl that he longed for in his youth, and begins a search for her once his business is established. He finds that she too has left the village and has achieved fame and success that greatly overshadows his modest prosperity. Manoevering to stay ahead of the game while trying to reestablish contact with the woman of his dreams, "you" serves as our guide to a struggling economy in a country most people know little about, facing every pitfall imaginable, and providing us with a remarkable and engrossing story not to be missed.
Recommended sites to check out - thanks to my readers for suggestions!
Peterborough Town Library; Peterborough, New Hampshire, 2009. Established in 1833, this is the first tax-supported library in the United States.
Willard Library, Evansville; Indiana, 2011. Built in 1885, this is the oldest public library in Indiana. Housed in a spectacular Victorian building, it is rumored to be haunted. While photographing a dark corner of the interior, I thought I saw the resident ghost. Live GhostCams are currently keeping watch at willardghost.com.
Millicent Library; Fairhaven, Massachusetts, 1994. In 1894, Mark Twain wrote a letter calling this library “ideal”: “Books are the liberated spirits of men, and should be bestowed in a heaven of light and grace and harmonious color and sumptuous comfort, like this, instead of in the customary kind of public library, with its depressing austerities and severities of form and furniture and decoration. A public library is the most enduring of memorials…. All other things which I have seen today must pass away and be forgotten; but there will still be a Millicent Library when by the mutations of language the books that are in it now will speak in a lost tongue to your posterity.”
Mill Valley Public Library; Mill Valley, California, 2012.
Mark Twain Branch Library; Detroit, Michigan, 2011. This is one of several Detroit-libraries branches that closed in 2011, owing to budget cuts.
The Handley Regional Library; Winchester, Virginia, 2011. A Confederate sympathizer built this library after the Civil War.
George Washington Carver Branch Library; Austin, Texas, 2011. Black citizens in East Austin strongly advocated for a library in their community, and this was the first branch to serve them. The mural is by the Austin artist John Fisher.
A library built by former slaves; Allensworth, California, 1995. Allen Allensworth was born into slavery, in Kentucky, in 1842. He later became a petty officer in the U.S. Navy, a Baptist minister, and a chaplain in the U.S. Army, and he founded the colony of Allensworth in Tulare County, California, in the early part of the twentieth century. This library is a re-creation of the original, in what is now called Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park.
A former night club and library; St. Louis, Illinois, 2012. Originally built as an Elks Club, this abandoned library was once a popular night club, where Miles Davis, who grew up in East St. Louis, got his start.
Central Library; Seattle, Washington, 2009. The Dutch architects Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Ramus were the principal designers of this library, which opened in 2004.
Richard F. Boi Memorial Library, the first Little Free Library; Hudson, Wisconsin, 2012. Todd Boi started the Little Free Library movement as a tribute to his mother, who was a book lover and a schoolteacher, by mounting a wooden container designed to look like a schoolhouse on a post on his lawn. Library owners can create their own boxes, usually about the size of a dollhouse, or purchase one from the movement’s Web site (littlefreelibrary.org).
The Queens Library bookmobile; New York, 2012. The bookmobile stationed in the Rockaways, after Hurricane Sandy.
In the course of eighteen years, beginning in 1994, the California-based photographer Robert Dawson took pictures of hundreds of public libraries across the United States. The results are collected in his new book, “The Public Library: A Photographic Essay,” to be released next month. Many writers have written eloquently about the role of libraries in American life (see Mark Twain’s impassioned praise of Fairhaven, Massachusetts’ Millicent Library, in the third slide above), but Dawson’s project makes a powerful case for how public libraries serve communities in every corner of the country. In the introduction, he writes, “Public libraries are worth fighting for, and this book is my way of fighting.”
All photographs from “Public Library: A Photographic Essay,” by Robert Dawson, Princeton Architectural Press, 2014.
The Peterborough Town Library was an important part of our family's life during the twenty years that we lived in this idyllic community - mainly in the summer but also through a few long snowy winters as well. Our children went from the library playpen to checking out stacks of books for the summer reading program organized and encouraged by children's librarian, Joan Butler. Many years later my daughter was hired by Miss Butler to shelve books and assist in the children's area - now she is a writer and editor, as well as a mom who spends every week in the library with her own child.
See all the wonderful photos of great small libraries from the New Yorker Magazine through this link:
http://origin.www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/03/slide-show-american-public-libraries-great-and-small.html?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm
Short takes. . .
This is a Happy Marriage - Ann Patchett. A collection of personal essays that piece together the life of the writer - surprisingly personal, funny, and introspective.
The Girl You Left Behind - Jojo Mayes. The hardship and brutality endured by the wife of a French artist during World War I is revealed when the provenance of a portrait of her is challenged two generations later - an intriguing mystery, romance, and historical drama.
Sweet reading. . .
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