Read-Around

When my book group assigned revisiting a classic book or catching up on a classic we “should have read,” my first thought was of Look Homeward, Angel. A lifetime ago, I was an English major, and Thomas Wolfe was one of my favorite writers. For some time, I’ve felt the book calling to me from its comfortable perch, so the other day I took it from the shelf and settled down to read. Immediately, I was struck by two things. First, the absolute beauty of Wolfe’s writing. Second, by the lonely, desperate, bleak landscape of humanity his fiction creates. “O lost!” says it all, I think. Perspective and experience can make two readings of the same words very different adventures.

“Can’t cook but doesn’t bite.” That’s how Rose Llewellyn advertises her services as a housekeeper. I stayed up way too late reading The Whistling Season, a novel set on the Montana prairie in 1909. When Rose moves from Minneapolis to work for Oliver Milliron, a widower with three young sons, there’s something for anyone who enjoys a literary visit to another place and time in American history. Ivan Doig’s writing and love of language is something to savor, even if Rose’s cooking is not!

Reading The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch is a deeply satisfying experience that evokes the tangy scent of salt air, the texture of sand under foot, plus the joys and pangs of adolescence. Through his thirteen-year-old protagonist Miles, Lynch imparts an aching sense of the wonder and mystery of nature. A perfectly poignant summer read and a book you’ll want to share.

Finishing Gentlemen and Players was the perfect way to spend a rainy afternoon. I’ve been saving this treat, and once again Joanne Harris did not disappoint. I’ve been a committed fan ever since reading Chocolat and recommending it to so many friends. This novel is not what I expected, but the unexpected is exactly what made it so satisfying. The mystery centers around St. Oswald’s, a British boys’ school. What can I say without saying too much? It’s a page turner!

Pulitzer prize winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, Mornings Like This

“Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. ” The Writing Life

I grew up in Roanoke and was in high school when Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek became a phenomenon. It made a tremendous impression. And it’s a book I keep meaning to revisit. Although Dillard no longer makes her home near here, I’ll always think of her as a local author.

Annie Dillard has a forthcoming novel The Maytrees. She was born April 30, 1945.

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leapt with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seemed it winter still, and you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.

–William Shakespeare, Sonnet 98

Shakespeare’s birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23. The Bard of Avon was born in 1564.

In her book Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, Louise Gluck has written, “…poems are autobiography…and comment, the metronomic alternation of anecdote and response.”

A night in summer. Sounds of a summer storm.
The great plates invisibly shifting and changing —
And in the dark room, the lovers sleeping in each other’s arms.
We are, each of us, the one who wakens first,
who stirs first and sees, there in the first dawn,
the stranger.

From “Prism” in Gluck’s latest collection Averno.

Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize Winner Louise Gluck was born April 22, 1943. Averno is now available in paperback.

Whenever confronted with loss, I find myself turning again to these words that I first highlighted many years ago in my college textbook:

“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.”

John Donne

Meditation XVII

1615

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Massacre is a word we never thought to associate with our town. We cannot comprehend how the events of two hours can have changed us forever. We grieve with all who have lost loved ones and friends. Especially, I pray for the parents who have had a child ripped from their lives by senseless violence. The fabric of our lives is soiled and torn; it will take all of us to begin the repairs.

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“I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.”

SEAMUS HEANEY, This Week magazine, Apr. 15, 2004

I love this quote! Irish poet Seamus Heaney was born April 13, 1939. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.