Category Archives: Reading

A What-To-Read-Next Dilemma

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Reading time has been slim these days, but a short vacation to visit an old friend afforded a bit of time on her gorgeously comfortable leather sofa to finish a book and a begin another, a gift from that said friend.

The book I finally managed to complete was Doug Brinkley’s The Majic Bus: An American Odyssey.  This has been on my shelf forever and I got to it from my revisionist history reading.  Brinkley created an on-the-road history course and spent a summer criss-crossing the country with his students, immersing themselves in America, using the country as textbook.  The book itself was a hybrid: part textbook when Brinkley took time to provide background as well as his own personal and professional spin on the locations being visited and part travelogue with details about attractions, restaurants and night spots.  Mostly, I walked away with a huge list of musicians and writers added to my must-listen, must-read lists, starting with Robert Johnson and Thomas Wolfe.  Johnson was easy…I found recordings on the Internet archive.  Locating Wolfe was actually easy as well since I inherited a copy of both Look Homeward Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again from the good doctor whose spirit enshrouds the farmhouse.

I had started the former right before leaving and then did not take it along.  When Brinkley’s chronicle came to an end, I turned to one of the books from my friend whose preference is British lit: A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz. Each chapter revolves around one of the novels and I found myself connecting to the network to download Emma, a book I read many years ago.

We also went to see the newest version of Jane Eyre, which was terrific, atmospheric, moody, just the perfect vision of the novel.  I actually prefer the Brontes to Austen and have read Jane Eyre multiple times, but a new copy now resides on my Nook.

This morning, I stole a few minutes from unpacking to pick up Thomas Wolfe and begin the story of Eugene Gant from the beginning.  The sweeping panorama of the first few pages was beginning to make me wonder if there would be something more intimate when Wolfe pulled me down to the very birth of Eugene.  But before that it was the description of his tortured father’s garden that washed over me:

Then, in the cool long glade of yard that stretched four hundred feet behind the house he planted trees and grape vines. And whatever he touched in that rich fortress of his soul sprang into golden life: as the years passed, the fruit trees–the peach, the plum, the cherry, the apple–grew great and bent beneath their clusters. His grape vines thickened into brawny ropes of brown and coiled down the high wire fences of his lot, and hung in a dense fabric, upon his trellises, roping his domain twice around. They climbed the porch end of the house and framed the upper windows in thick bowers. And the flowers grew in rioting glory in his yard–the velvet-leaved nasturtium, slashed with a hundred tawny dyes, the rose, the snowball, the redcupped tulip, and the lily. The honeysuckle dropped its have mass upon the fence; wherever his great hands touched the earth, it grew fruitful for him.

Aah…I suppose some might find it too prosey but I just dove in, relishing the thick description, thinking about our own property with its sprawling vines and towering trees.

So, I suppose I don’t have a dilemma: I’m going American for now.

NB: It took me two days to write this entry and I haven’t picked up Wolfe in all that time. We are making almost daily trips back and forth between the city house and the farm with car loads of our possessions.  The weather is horribly hot so if we take a break, we end up napping, storing up energy for the next explosion of energy.  So, the reading dilemma may be a moot point.

 

Settling In and Sharing Our New Home

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The past two weeks have been a bit nuttier than even that past two months as we have hosted visitors for the past two weekends. First, an open house for our “city” friends so they could see what we are up to out here in the country.  We had a weekend-long drop in and were happily surprised with the number of people who were willing to make the trek especially since, with the largest ferry out of commission, the float across the James River is longer than usual.

This weekend, my family arrived to celebrate the shared birthdays of me and my nephew.  My sister hadn’t seen the place, and she was full of great ideas for making some changes.  Everyone offered their time for painting and cleaning as well.  We could make great progress if we had a work week.  Just need a few more beds and another working shower so they could stay with us.

Now, everyone is gone and our small group are all resting.  My husband and Tina Turner are napping on the bedroom while Spot and I share the porch where a lovely light breeze is keeping it cooler, and we can hear the birds.  Spot and I were out early this morning for a walk and then some trash clean up along the road.  I try not to be too judgmental of others, but I really wonder about the moral leanings of those who would throw an almost empty plastic milk jug out of the car window as they cruised down the road.  Really?  The world is your trash can?  My bag filled up and I still have a bit to go so we’ll head back later.
But, I thought I should catch up on the chronicle.  Between working for clients and working to get the place in shape for visitors, I have had neither time to write nor read.  How ironic!  I finally have a place where I can see and touch my books, but I don’t have any spare time.  I try at night but am so tired, I rarely last more than a page or two.  I picked up Mark Kurlansky’s anthology of food writing, Choice Cuts, thinking essays would be the way to go but haven’t made it much past the introduction and I’m not sure I completely connected with his distinctions between gourmet and gourmand as I just found it difficult to concentrate.
My life is much more physical than it was in Williamsburg,  That is one of the huge differences for me.  I still have seat work for my clients and am thrilled that my Aeron desk chair came over on the last truck load.  But, I spend at least two hours and sometimes many more engaged in physical work.  Here’s one of those “be careful what you wish for” stories:  I was always an early riser and loved the early morning, thinking of it as my time before the rest of the world awoke and the world of work intruded.  But once I stopped commuting and the dogs got so old, I found that I was sleeping later and later.  Still getting up earlier than my husband but sometimes sleeping until the unheard of hour of 8 AM!  I found myself missing seeing the sun rise and watching the fog burn off the fields, the first bird song and the contented clucking of the chickens.
Well, I am an early riser again!  Spot wakes with first light and waits patiently in his crate until he sees some movement in the bed.  I’m usually just slumbering by then and it doesn’t take long to hear the shake and then open my eyes to the big black speckled muzzle pushing gently but insistently under the sheet. We’re outside in a few minutes, usually with Tina tagging along.  This morning, she stuck with us through the back alleys near the silo, emerging in the field where we turned for home.  On mornings when Tina bails out before the silo, preferring to head home and tuck back into bed with my husband, we turn right and walk the perimeter of the field, out to the road for a short bit and then up the curving driveway to the house.  I haven’t managed to measure it yet.  I have an app on my phone but haven’t been alert enough to turn it on.  Perhaps when I finish here, I will take him around to give it a try.
And then there’s just house and farm work in general: planting flowers, watering tomato plants, scrubbing floors and walls.  We also finally moved out our bed, a refrigerator and freezer as well as some chairs.  With the trailer, we will be able to move most of the rest of our furniture and it was amazing how having a few more things along with some treasured paintings and picture suddenly made us feel like this was our home
So, the transition is mostly over.  It had its rocky moments, certainly, but as we settle into a schedule here, we find we like the somewhat slower pace.  And I appreciate the distraction from the digital world.  I do my work and keep track of things from my phone, but without television, I feel like I am more focused and productive.  We get a few channels through the converter box out here but no cable news channels, no food tv, no discovery. I don’t really miss the chattering voices.  I get my news more from reading than listening or viewing these days, a practice which I hope encourages me to be more reflective.  We do take advantage of NPR for news and entertainment so will be sending them a hefty contribution this year, even as we cancel our cable television service in the burg.
The sun is out and there is an apple tree that has needed planted for a week now. I also want to put in sunflower and zinnia seeds around the telephone down by the road.  I’m going to put on grubby clothes and head out with my shovel and rake.  Later, I’ll try to find time to enjoy the porch and a good book.  They are promising more storms so if I can plant a few things, they will benefit from the natural rain.
We love the company but it is different from our normally quiet days, and it is nice to have the calm restored.  But having the visitors also forced us to make the place a little more personally liveable.  We even set up an informal guest room for my nephew.  So it all works out and now it’s back to normal, whatever that means!

Update From Bottle Tree Farm(s)

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We’re still deciding on the “s”…some of it may depend on the availability of domain names.

It is a beautiful Sunday morning at the farm and I was checking in on my online classes so, since I’m tethered, I thought I’d do a quick farm update.  This weekend was all about the chickens.  We had four in our pen in Williamsburg.  They had an automatic door so it was easy for them to get in and out, and since they live on the compost pile, food wasn’t a problem.  The SmokehouseUnfortunately, they had also discovered how to escape and when we went home last week, I discovered three of them roosting outside of the pen.  (Chickens are really good at getting out but not so good about getting back in.) It was time to bring them to the farm.

We’re using part of the old smokehouse, which took me several days of work to clean out.  The pen was easier, and now they are happily scratching away and clucking contentedly.  Chickens evidently deal with change pretty easily as I’ve even found three eggs in the past 24 hours.

Bob is making trips back and forth to the convenience center; there was lots of plain old junk and trash in the smokehouse. But there were a few treasures as well: bee smokers, two file cabinets filled with interesting stuff, a metal table, buckets, several tool boxes, and lots of other interesting bits.   We donated the two lawn chairs to the chickens for roosting, along with two crutches.  (The former owner was a doctor.)  The center section is next and it is similarly filled, as is the dairy barn.  The secret is to just hack away a bit at a time without thinking too much about the big picture.

I am especially excited about the library.  I spent some quality time in there on a cold, rainy day last week, getting organized by figuring out where various collections would go: education, history,  and nature are my three big groups along with lots of fiction, of course.  I have the next group of boxes ready to go inside and unpacking should go much more quickly.  After years of having books everywhere, including the linen closet, I find myself just standing in the room looking at the spines and imagining all the hours of reading ahead of me.  The same rule goes there as with the farm: a bit at a time.

I did take a day away from revisionist history to read The People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks.  It was refreshingly good with its insights into history, religion and politics.  It makes connections between the past and present in ways that would make people like James Loewen (Lies My Teachers Told Me) happy.  I did find the story a bit thin in some places with a reliance on coincidences that were a bit too coincidental.

Now, it’s back into history with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. It is a bit depressing really, especially when you consider that the attitudes and ideas he discusses are still very much part of our lives even now as reflected in all the budget conversations and deliberations that are going on.  I’ll leave you with this story from Weekend Edition about the school funding fight in New Jersey.

Real People, Real History, Real World

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I finished Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James Loewen. I read the first edition, published in 1995.  I was particularly taken with his description of the more recent past and how poorly books address it: that “recent past” in 1995 was my own childhood: Vietnam, the energy crisis, and environmental degradation.  No wonder my generation tends to be a bit more cynical than say my Boomer friends who grew up with Howdy Doody and “I like Ike!” No textbook, no matter how rosy its outlook, can put a positive spin on Nixon or, for that matter, Love Canal.

There’s an update and I took a glance at the comments in Amazon.  Mostly, Loewen gets accused of his own left wing, anti-American, anti-white-male bias, a charge he anticipates and even tries to address in the book.  For instance, after revealing the people behind the caricatures of Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller, he suggests that seeing them as real people means that we provide authentic role models to students who might help them as  they face their own decisions and the potential consequences: “For when textbook authors leave out the warts, the problems, the unfortunate character traits, and the mistaken ideas, they reduce heroes from dramatic men and women to melodramatic stick figures.  Their inner struggles disappear and they become goody-goody, not merely good” (p. 27).  What Loewen argues for throughout the book is simply a more realistic viewpoint.  We don’t need to go from America the perfect to America the horrible; instead, we need to learn a realistic view of our nation that, like many others, struggled in sometimes incredibly hypocritical ways to define and practice its values, a struggle that continues today and in which every citizen can play a role.

I do wish he would reconsider the title: the book is really about textbooks, not teachers, who while they do have some control over how they teach, often have no control over what they teach. But Lies My Textbook Told Me just isn’t a snappy a title, is it?  This is another one of those complex issues that gets simplified by being laid at the door of the teachers.

Reading Review

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Despite the busy-ness of March, I have been reading and listening to books.  I enjoyed another Flavia de Luce mystery, A Red Herring Without Mustard, read by Jayne Entwhistle.  Fluff but the chemistry and culture keep me coming back.  As for reading, I made it through Outlander although I’ll admit to skimming the last 75 pages or so and am wondering about reading the next one in the series, of which I have all of them on the shelf.  I was put off by the sadistic violence and found the main character to be more annoying than inspiring.  Plus it was just too long.  My other fictional foray wasn’t much better:  I wallowed in Pat Conroy’s gorgeous, thick prose in South of Broad but found the story to be somewhat cliche with a little sexual perversion thrown in to spice things up.

Fortunately, my history reading has been a bit more riveting: I loved Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis, finding it fascinating after the John Adams biography, and finally picked up Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington by Daniel Mark Epstein.  I loved the way Epstein merged politics and poetry and described both men with sympathetic affection.

Now, it’s Loewen and textbooks with Zinn seeming to be the next logical choice.  I may stick with nonfiction for awhile although I’ve got Ken Follett and Jonathan Franzen in the basket by my chair in the library just waiting for the house to get warm.  Aaah…so much to read, so little time!  But for now, I’ll hit post as we are heading to the ferry.  Happy reading!

Of Textbooks and Serendipitous Reading

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Tim’s thoughtful Assorted Stuff blog post about textbooks coincided with my reading of Blood: Stories of Life and Death from the Civil War, an anthology of mostly primary source documents. While it didn’t offer specific dates and times like a textbook would, it provided a human view of the time and, as Tim pointed out, could easily be supplemented with material available on the web to create a completely serviceable “textbook.”   I haven’t ever been a fan of textbooks–especially history–because in trying to get it all in, they inevitably have to pick and choose about both what to leave in and what to leave out, what to emphasize and what to gloss over, and, in the end, leave us with the impression that historical truth in the guise of dates and names somehow exists.  Plus, they are really just boring.  As I’ve written before, I think we can use the media to make history generally more engaging, even (horrors!) at the expense of complete accuracy.

Because, as we’re learning in my own state, textbooks themselves have no great claim to correctness.  And here’s where the serendipitous reading comes in: as I’ve been drafting this entry, I picked up a book that has been on my shelf for some time, right next to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me.  A quote from Zinn graces the front cover, recommending this book to every citizen, and I’m not sure what I thought it was about, but it turns out it focuses on high school American history textbooks.

I am not very far along but had to share this quote as it seems to sum up my own sense of the real problem with using textbooks to teach.  This chapter focuses on the myth of Columbus’s discovery of America, and Loewen provides a table that outlines all the possible voyages to America prior to Columbus.  They go back thousands of years and have varying levels of empirical support.  Loewen points out that they are also not mentioned in most textbooks and suggests that we could really teach students something about history if they were:

The evidence for each of these journeys offers fascinating glimpses into the societies and cultures that existed on both sides of the Atlantic and in Asia before 1492. They also reveal controversies among those who study the distant past.  If textbooks allowed for controversy, they could show students which claims rest on strong evidence, which on softer ground. As they challenged students to make their own decisions as to what probably happened, they would also be introducing students to the various methods and forms of evidence–oral history, written records, cultural similarities, linguistic changes, human blood types, pottery, archaeological dating, plant migrations–that researchers use to derive knowledge about the distant past. Unfortunately, textbooks seem locked into a rhetoric of certainty. James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle, coauthors of the textbook The United States–A History of the Republic, have also written After the Fact, a book for college history majors in which they emphasize that history is not a set of facts but a series of arguments, issues, and controversies. Davidson and Lytle’s high school textbook, however, like its competitors, presents history as answers, not questions.

The “rhetoric of certainty” is just a perfect description of the whole process of standardizing history and presenting it in a textbook.  Wish I had coined it…but Loewen did and I am looking forward to reading the rest of the book.  I love it when a book appears just when I need it.  Now, I suppose there are historians who will question Loewen’s ideas but that’s another post.

At Home

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It is a lovely day…not quite spring but not winter either.  I am sitting on the front porch of my old house listening to the train come along the tracks.  The whistle blows just at our property and I can’t get enough of it. It’s part of the soundtrack of this place and the rhythm of the clattering cars is reassuring somehow.

After a week away and then two days in Williamsburg to get caught up on laundry and life, I am back at the farm and ready to stay.  The main house has a useable kitchen and bathroom that just need a really good scrubbing.  We sleep and hang out in the cottage as it is easier to warm and have created a little living area amidst the clutter of tools and supplies.  A little shuffling between the two houses, but it works and is certainly preferable to shuffling between the burg and the farm.  I knew going into this adventure that I would not be good at living in two places as I’ve never quite been able to imagine people who have weekend homes.

I am a homebody and very much a creature of habit.  I have a morning routine.  I have an evening routine.  And, I suppose I’m showing my aspberger’s when I say that, if those routines get disrupted for more than about a week, I get cranky. It’s been ten days since I left for Pennsylvania.  I love my visits with stops at the farmer’s markets and favorite restaurants, but the already difficult reentry was more complex as I had to decide where to go–burg or farm–and ended up splitting the difference by moving between both places and back in the space of 24 hours.  Add a client with a last minute programming project and I’ve been a little shaky.

But, as my car slid onto the noon time ferry today, and I saw the newly-arrived osprey land on a piling, I felt some calm returning.  I packed to stay.  Internet access is still a little wonky, but I think I can run the webinar from here.  Mostly, I need to declare one residence rather than trying to live in two.  And for now, the house needs the work.  I’m loving puttering in my library!  I’m going to experiment with scanning bar codes this afternoon as I clean shelves and stack books.  Even cleaning the kitchen and bathroom seems downright fun as it makes so much difference in our quality of life.

The previous owner’s daughter stopped by with her husband and son and we chatted about the farm and books.  He has offered to plow the field for our garden and will do soybeans on the bulk of the farm.  Our realtor lives in the next county and has ideas for forming an informal coop. So, we seem to be settling right in.  Now, if I could just find a drive-through ATM.

I knew I would fall in love with this place, but it’s happening sooner than I thought.  There is something to do all the time, but there are also moments to savor.  I am a bit less connected as I have to tether my phone, so I am better able to monitor my email and work in general.  I find I do it in chunks and then put it away to concentrate on something else.  We haven’t brought a television so I have lots more free time from the sometimes mindless surfing I do. We listen to a lot more music and stream NPR news and that seems to be enough media for right now.

I’ve been reading nonstop and I watched most of the HBO John Adams series yesterday as I wrote code and played with databases.  There is much to report about how important it is for us to understand our current partisanship in light of our early history. I’m also going to commit a bit of heresy by suggesting that I didn’t really like Diana Galbadon.   But that’s all for another post.

Bob just headed down the driveway in his pickup, Tina Turner the beagle riding shotgun.  It is time for me to head inside and do some of my own work.

Learning to Like John Adams

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A year after I originally planned it, I am reading John Adams, David McCullough’s biography of the great American leader. I have seen the television series so can’t really get Paul Giamatti out of my head, and it appears that he did a good job of portraying Adams: plain spoken, intense, impatient. In talks I give, I compare him unfavorably with Franklin and Jefferson in terms of getting along with people, and that may be an exaggeration, although I haven’t gotten to his years in France.

Perhaps the surprising part of reading the biography for me is that I’ve always been a Jefferson admirer–the complex Renaissance man living on a mountaintop surrounded by books–but I think I’m actually more like Adams. Here’s McCullough’s comparison:

“It was Jefferson’s graciousness that was so appealing. He was never blunt or assertive as Adams could be, but subtle, serene by all appearances, always polite, soft-spoken, and diplomatic, if somewhat remote. With Adams there was seldom a doubt about what he meant by what he said. With Jefferson there was nearly always a slight air of ambiguity. In private conversation Jefferson “sparkled,” But, in Congress, like Franklin, he scarcely said a word, and if he did, it was in a voice so weak as to be almost inaudbile” (p. 112).

Adams kept diaries of his thoughts and feelings while Jefferson kept meticulous account books. Jefferson was interested in mankind but not particularly interested in individual people. Here’s one more line:

“Where Adams was stout, Jefferson was lean and long-limbed, almost bony. Where Adams stood foursquare to the world, shoulders back, Jefferson customarily stood with arms folded tightly across his chest…Jefferson wished to avoid the rough and tumble of life whenever possible. John Adams’s irrepressible desire was to seize hold of it” (pp. 111-113).

There’s another thing I share with Adams, or at least the young Adams, and that is a sense that I never quite meet my resolutions: “Why we he constantly forming yet never executing good resolutions? Why was he so absent-minded, so lazy, so prone to daydreaming his life away? He vowed to read more seriously. He vowed to quick chewing tobacco.” McCullough quotes a diary entry from 1756 in which Adams resolves to “rise with the sun” and study each morning, the Scriptures on the weekend, and then Latin authors on the other days. “But,” writes McCullough, “the next morning he slept until seven and a one-line entry the following week read, ‘A very rainy day. Dreamed away the time.'”

Oh, one more thing…as we get closer to closing on the farm, I’ll be balancing the academic and the domestic life. In this way, I am also like the young Adams. Like Adams in fall of 1758, my formal education is complete, and I am moving into a new phase of my professional and private life:

“For the first time, he was on his own with his studies, and he bent to them with the spirit of independence and intense determination that were to characterize much of his whole approach to life. In his diary, he wrote of chopping wood and translating Justinian, with equal resolve” (p. 43).

I am reading the book slowly…it is very detailed and I want to enjoy the story and the prose. Friends felt it was too detailed perhaps but I like having the human view of this time period as McCullough describes Adams and his colleagues as the human beings they were, human beings forced to be leaders in extraordinary times.

A Rousing Good Tale

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The library book I am finishing is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s English adventure story Sir Nigel. It is the prequel to The White Company, which I read last month. Here, we learn about Sir Nigel as a young man off to the wars with Edward III. He vows to commit three brave deeds before he can win his love, the dark beauty Mary.

It is a violent tale, full of battle scenes, with fields littered and boat decks littered with bodies. And yet it is also full of chivalric values such as honoring women and engaging in fair play. The language is full of high sentiment and ringing phrases that sound a little silly to the contemporary ear. As I read, I imagine myself as ten-year-old boy in an earlier generation thrilling to the stories of heroic knights and their beautiful ladies.

Yet, this is any adventure story…it is one written by the creator of Sherlock Holmes. A writer with definite opinions about the world. The book is full of detailed descriptions of the medieval world as well as observations about the class system. In a particularly funny scene, the upper class squire and his lower class attendant share a flea ridden bed in an inn. While the attendant scratches and rolls to ease his itching, the squire lies still as it is improper for a gentleman to show any inconvenience: “To a man who had learned the old rule of chivalry there were no small ills in life. It was beneath the dignity of his soul to stoop to observe them. Could and hear, hunger and thirst, such things did not exist for the gentleman. The armor of his soul was so complete that it was proof not only against the great ills of life but even against the small ones.”

I picked up this book after finishing Arthur & George, historical fiction about Doyle. I have all the Holmes mysteries on my Nook; those I got for free at manybooks.net. Both of the adventure books are available there along with a long list of other books written by Doyle. They are also available at Project Gutenberg.

Support Your Public Library

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I am reading a library book! That’s right…a public library book that I will have to return in two weeks. Of course, I’ve already had to renew it once but I’m confident in my ability to finish it this time. I checked it out along with another book and a music CD when I attended a Civil War presentation held at the library. It had been so long since I had been there that I had to update my card information!

I have nothing against public libraries and, in fact, think they are one of the best institutions. During our travels in early Internet days, we often found access at libraries. I volunteered in the public library in my home town when I was a teenager, shelving books and cutting out name tags for the pre-school reading circles. Actually, I even volunteered at THIS public library during their summer reading program. And, in the days before I controlled my own money, I was a public library user.

But I’m not any more. I like owning books and being able to come to them in my own good time. I may think I want to read a book right away when I’m holding it in my hands at the library, but who knows what might happen by the time I get home. That book may have reminded me of another one that needs to be read first. And, if I really want to read a book immediately, I won’t wait to go to the library to check it out: I’ll just buy it on one of the two ereaders I now own. If it’s not available digitally, I would just as soon buy it from Amazon than drive to the library. Sad, but true. I have joined the “buy it now” generation, unable to postpone pleasure. And, even sadder? When I do buy a book, I almost never read it right away. It goes on the shelf and waits its turn, which may come sooner or later. So, I could certainly allow the library to store it for me and then go get it when it gets to the top of the list.

This year, I am going to try to become a public library user. As I clean out my books for the move to the farm, I’ll donate some to the library for their book sale. And, I certainly don’t want to buy any more analog books since I will just have to move them, so I’ll look to the library. Of course, there are plenty of unread books on my shelves but there’s something about knowing I have wider access that comforts me. I just like having books around me, endless possibilities for learning and laughing, musing and marveling.