Reading Road Trip ... Arizona

I've spent a lot of time in Arizona. I've been to the Tuscon Gem and Mineral show, I've been to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, which is an amazing place, especially if you're their for thier "Raptor Show." I've toured Biosphere 2 in Oracle, AZ and generally soaked up the sun in Phoenix. It's a red state, so I don't think I could live there, but I do like to visit it.

Three Arizona books stand out for me. one is Navajos Wear Nikes, a memoir by Jim Kristofic, who grew up on the reservation after his mother took a job working at a hospital there. He's an outsider--a white kid--but it's still an intriguing look at life on the reservation.

There's also Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, a nonlinear, multi-character novel that meanders from the US to Central America. The book was published in the 90s and the writer's treatment of gay characters (way too many of her villains are gay), but that sadly reflected the tenor of the times.

The book that's stayed with me the longest, though, is The Quartzite Trip, a novel about a school trip that goes very, very wrong that really gets teenage feelings right. There's a scene where a guy looks at a girl who's plagued by acne and as he sees her in the moonlight, he realizes what a beauty she is. It's incredibly tender. I can't believe this book is out of print. It's one I read, along with Red Sky at Morning, that made a deep impression on me and 36 years later, I can still remember the way it made me feel.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane ... a review

The Physic Book of Deliverence Dane by Katherine Howe

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A historian doing her mother a favor stumbles across a secret that changes her life.

Deliverance Dane was a “cunning woman” in the 17th century who failed to heal a child and became the subject of vicious gossip and accusations of witchcraft. Connie Goodwin is a Harvard-trained historian whose mother Grace sends her to Marblehead to clean out her grandmother’s house. While doing so, Connie runs across a reference to Deliverance that sends her on a quest to find the woman’s missing “book of physick,” her recipe of spells.

This dual time-frame story offers a somewhat different perspective on the Salem witch trials is much more interesting than the contemporary story. Connie isn’t as engaging a protagonist as Deliverance, and her academic search for the book of physick and the truth about Deliverance pales beside Deliverance’s own narrative. ture about some aspect of colonial life), but the stories being told here do not draw us in as much as they should.




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reading Road Trip...Alaska

When I was little, I was fascinated by the Iditarod race. (I even had a t-shirt that said, "Alaska, where men are men and women win the Iditarod.") So when I came across a mystery called Murder on the Iditarod Trail, I snapped it up. The author was Sue Henry, one of several women who have well-established Alaska-set mysteries. (Probably the best known is Diana Stabenow who writes the long-running Kate Sugak books.) Turns out there are a couple of other mystery writers who have made Alaska their stomping grounds. I'm a fan of John Straley (particularly his The Woman Who Married a Bear), and I intend to check out Christopher Lane's Inupiat mystery series.

For me, though, the quintessential Alaska book is John McPhee's Coming Into the Country. McPhee is widely known as a pioneer of "creative nonfiction" and I've been a fan of his since I read Oranges. His prose is cut-glass sharp but never pretentious. He's got books with titles so odd they suck you in, like The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed or The Curve of Binding Energy (a brilliant book about nukes) and his topics range from the geology of the West to a farmer's market (the title essay in Giving Good Weight).  One of his best books is La Place de la Concorde Swiss, which is about the Swiss Army and its role in society.Seriously. He will make you care about that.

Coming Into the Country is about both the land and the people on it and it's a grand colletion of personalities and observations. It made me want to visit Alaska more than ever before. Don't let that cover fool you (it looks like it was designed more for graphic impact than to give readers an idea of what's inside) and check it out if you're a fan of elegant writing and interesting subjects.

A Millennial Voice

For my generation, Joyce Maynard's Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties pretty much summed things up. The author, an elfin, barefoot figure in jeans and a yellow sweater stared solemnly at the reader from the cover, and you got the picture. This is an "old soul." Maynard's book was highly praised at the time and since its publication in 1973, she has written about the various stages of her life. She was born in 1953, so she's gracefully aging into her middle years now.)

I don't really know who spoke for Gen X or Gen Y but when Marina Keegan first burst onto the scene, it was clear that she was a talent to be reckoned with. The Opposite of Lonelness is a collection of her essays and short stories and a showcase for a writer already confident and accomplished. Sadly, it is a posthumous collection, and unlike Joyce Maynard, we will never have the pleasure of seeing the writer mature. She died in a car accident just after she graduated from college.

If you want to write, write. Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Reading Road Trip...Alabama

Robert McCammon's Boy's Life and Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe are both set in Alabama and they couldn't be more different. McCammon's book (a Bram Stoker award winning fantasy/horor) is set in Zephyr, Alabama in 1964 and it opens with a chilling scene as a car plunges into a lake some say are bottomless. A milkman who witnesses the accident while makings his rounds with his son, dives down to see if he can rescue the driver and discovers...this was no accident. Flagg's book, the basis for the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, is set in the fictional town of Whistle Stop, Alabama and tells the story of a friendship between two women and plays out against various timelines. I highly recommend both books.

And then there's This is Where it Ends by Marieke Nijcamp. Set in Opportunity, Alabama, it's the story of a school shooting told through multiple points of view. I have a fondness for that kind of storytelling (Ryan Gattis' All Involved is probably my favorite) and the writer does a fantastic job here. The book is tagged as YA but it is in the vein of Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give than John Green's The Fault in Our Stars.

the shooter in Nijcamp's book, Tyler Browne, is an outcast whose rage is fueled by the mantra, "I will make sure you remember me." In some ways it will remind readers of Todd Strasser's Give a Boy a Gun, a novel based on the 1999 Columbine school shooting.

The Reading Road Trip is coming!

Beginning in April, I'll be taking a reading road trip all around the country. From the Redwood forests (Rutherford G. Montgomery's book Kildee House) to the Gulfstream waters (Thomas McGuane's Key West novel Ninety-Two in the Shade), I'll be taking a look at local lit from all fifty states plus D.C., the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. I'll be covering a couple of books from some states and not all of the books I'll be reading are fiction. The route will be eccentric (I'm not going alphabetically) but I promise the trip will be fun.

there's an intriguing idea here

In the wake of the presidential election, I've been reading a lot more political-themed fiction and non-ficiton. This book seems to be a fusion of the two and the premise is provocative. The Last Bastion of Civilization: Japan 2041 sets out a scenario for a different kind of future. I'd really like to believe there is a civilized future out there. Here's the blurb and a testimonial:

Brexit, Trump, Le Pen: Where Are We Heading?

If you’re a contrarian, or simply wish to imagine a radically different future, The Last Bastion of Civilization will challenge your current world-view.
Written as a series of letters and short essays, each of the 18 chapters attacks a present-day assumption with a counter-punch argument of its own.
Sometimes controversial, always challenging, it’s a future to consider given today’s world affairs.

“Blencowe’s writing is fast-paced and easily readable. The structure of the book is unusual, in that it's not a novel, though not quite non-fiction. I can best categorize it as fictional journalism, or perhaps an imaginary opinion piece. He expresses himself clearly and his intentions and message are never in doubt.”  —Andrew Henry