Category Archives: books

A few brags

You might know, I launched a novel. As in PUBLISHED. It’s 321 pages long and you might like to read it. This means I can officially call myself an author now. And, I’ve already earned enough royalties to cover the cost of my ISBNs. Pretty cool.

I signed up for dental insurance all by myself. (Yeah, I know). My new Medicare card arrived. So did my drug card and my Gap policy card. All my passwords are in one folder and I know where to find that folder. I’m on fire!

I finished reading Lonesome Dove, all 800 plus pages. I had to finish it this week because there was no way I was gonna carry it to California.

Can I just say — it’s long, it’s grim, it’s a Western for god’s sake — and it is one of the best books I’ve ever read. I really didn’t want it to end.

Two people from very different walks of my life told me this was their favorite book ever, otherwise I doubt I’d ever have picked it up. Even though I’ve read Stegner’s Angle of Repose twice (and liked it so much I proceeded to read almost everything else he wrote), I was not a fan of Cormac McCarthy and McMurtry’s book was giving me McCarthy vibes.

Anyway. My advice? Not so much that you should read this novel, but that if two people you know without prompting tell you that X novel is their favorite book, run — don’t walk — and pick yourself up a copy.

Another book brag — I was pleased to see I’d read 39 of the NYTimes “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century” list. Maybe I should feel bad that the number isn’t higher? I’m fixing that with my next read: My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante.

(I was late to the McMurtry party and I’m also late to the Ferrante party).

She has TWO OTHER books on the list.

Lastly, can you guess what I’m starting to research with a view toward a second book (I decided against Lucy Audubon).

Hint: the setting is a lot closer than Charleston.

Sleep hygiene and a proof

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Okay okay! I should’ve done this years ago, but at my doctor’s suggestion I am now leaving my phone downstairs at bedtime. I do the NYTimes crossword sitting in the living room instead of propped up by pillows. But more importantly, there will be no more grabbing the device and reading in the wee hours (sometimes for many sleepless hours).

It is good to minimize exposure to blue light and to shun extraordinarily upsetting information when I should be resting. What a shitshow the news is! Watching the collapse of the press is another and secondary shitshow to the campaigns, but one that informs all other shitshows and is really, really upsetting. (Of course you will have noticed that I still subscribe to the NYTimes).

I’ll save my thoughts about the Biden question for another post (or for no post at all), but let me just say I flip from one side of the resignation idea to the other at least ten times a day.

My PCP also suggested no books in bed, but there I push back. It feels really good to go back to my old custom of reading a novel for 30 minutes or so before turning out the light.

(How else am I gonna get through Lonesome Dove? Have you seen the size of that book?)

The proof from Amazon arrived and there is, I confess, some magic in holding my book even if the cover was screwed up (see that white band along the bottom?)

Naturally I found a mistake. Not a typo so much as an out and out mistake. Referring to a character’s horse as male and then three paragraphs later, as female. Oops!

Ken is very patient and good thing because I’ve found other words that I want deleted or changed and at this point that means fixing three versions of the manuscript.

Mostly though I’m re-reading and making the historical notes that in my Author’s Note I promised would be published on my blog. I’ll probably post it before it’s done and revise as I go. There will be tons of disclaimers — I am not a historian, my research was idiosyncratic (i.e. the opposite of thorough), etc.

But there is a lot that I can confidently assert — that the name of the family’s property on Antigua was in fact Cabbage Tree Plantation, that Eliza, contrary to my telling, got her small pox variolation in England and not in South Carolina, that her mother was reported to have malaria.

The Notes are very much at odds with the standard disclaimer THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION, but I think readers might like to know what I based on the historic record. I’m especially committed to this idea when it comes to a couple of the most egregious and sadistic torments inflicted on the enslaved (I didn’t make it up!)

You get the idea.

Have a great Sunday!

ISBNs, bar codes, and sneakers

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Solomon seal emerging.

Bleeding heart nodding with fuscia flowers.

A luminous volunteer.

We enjoyed the patio a bit this morning even though it was chilly.

Today my husband and I employed the body double system to get two publishing-related administrative tasks done. Sometimes I was the body double and my husband the doer and sometimes the reverse. Mostly Ken was the doer. (There! That’s my husband’s name). Both tasks involved wrangling with passwords which generally sends me screaming from the room. Literally. So the system was necessary.

And how nice — my book is now officially copyrighted and listed in the Library of Congress!

(Not strictly necessary but felt prudent). And amazing.

Then later, we headed over to the website Bowker where they sell ISBNs and bar codes. I bought ten of the former and two of the latter.

The publisher I’m thinking of going with (D2D) provides free ISBNs but then they are the holder of record instead of me. Though it is perhaps without consequence, I don’t like that idea.

I bought ten because each format needs its own number (one for paperback, one for hardback, and one for epub) and once you get to three, the bulk price of ten is cheaper. (BTW, if you only published an ebook, you wouldn’t need an ISBN at all).

And anyway, those extra numbers feel like cheerleaders rallying me to write another book.

In other big news, I spent an obscene amount of money on a pair of New Balance Fresh Foam X 1080’s — had a fit consult and everything. They are like walking on marshmallows!

Who is this person taking care of herself? Spending money on herself?

It feels good. And anyway, the PT told me to do it.

A brand new fucking glitch on WordPress is not inserting a space between pics. So get used to captions! I had spaces between photos since 2008 and now — PooF! — not.

To find without looking

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When walking on a beach or a forest trail, I am generally scouting the ground for two kinds of rocks: rocks with stripes or heart-shaped rocks. Invariably, a find feels like a gift.

This morning in Truro I wasn’t looking but found a heart-shaped rock anyway — one of the best I’ve ever come across.

This being the morning of opening statements in the election interference case against trump in Manhattan, I take the stone to mean something positive — a sign that justice might in fact be coming, coming for a nation starved for it.

The wind was bracing on the Cape this weekend but my time away with a friend was relaxing nonetheless. We snacked. Walked. Read. Wrote Postcards to Voters. Not a second of TV for two whole days!

On Saturday, I finished North Woods by Daniel Mason, a challenging and extraordinary read that I might put in the same category as The Overstory, in no small part because trees feature so centrally.

The novel takes place over several hundred years in Western Mass where one piece of property in the so-called North Woods is the connecting link between various sequential stories. There are twin girls undone by jealousy. A painter who loves another man and pays the price for that. A mother with a schizophrenic son, forever holding out hope that he will somehow straighten himself out even as he frantically wanders the land, believing his footsteps are stitching the ground and keeping it pieced together.

Chestnut trees come and go. An apple orchard is planted and then goes to ruin. Elm and hemlock suffer from blight or invasive insects and vanish. Mountain lions and passenger pigeons disappear too.

The haunting spirits of people who came before affect subsequent residents to a greater or lesser degree. As my husband said, “It’s essentially a ghost story.”

Yes. And perhaps the central ghost story is the one produced by the land itself. Earlier incarnations of nature haunt the landscape with what came before, producing a sense of profound loss.

Road near where my parents built a house

Because I grew up in Western Mass (sort of), I felt an especially strong connection to the setting. I could see those fields, those trail heads, the banks of snow.

Buffy and me. 1974? Jiminy Peak visible.

Since the Berkshires might be the only place that has ever felt like home to me, the stories made me miss the place. Or the feeling of the place. Or my youth. I guess it’s complicated even though it’s an old and widely-shared story.

And then, because the climate crisis has produced terrifying evidence of the planet’s warming, the descriptions of blizzards (so many blizzards!) caused an acute nostalgia for a vanishing world. Not just dying plants and creatures, but the disruption of seasons and the loss of habitability. In other words, the book prompts mourning not just for our particular past, but for humanity’s collective past.

I’ll be thinking about this story for a while.

Two books and a movie

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First the movie: Midnight Run. I’ve probably seen this film five times and it always makes me laugh my ass off. This clip has one of my very favorite movie lines of all times. It’s at the very end. Clip is just over a minute — 1:06.

Not that you need to know, but Charles Grogan plays an accountant who unwittingly works for the mob in Chicago. Once he finds out, he steals millions from them and gives it to charity. He’s been indicted and is out on bail.

De Niro plays a former cop, also from Chicago, who left because he was unwilling to take bribes. He now works as a bail bondsman in Los Angeles and has been tasked with bringing Grogan in.

The books: a novel by Maggie O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait and short stories by George Saunders, Tenth of December.

Historic fiction set in Italy in the 16th century

I finished The Marriage Portrait but found it to be a bit of a slog. I love this writer (this is the fifth book of hers that I’ve read) and I will continue to read her, but here she indulged in too much description of nature and interior moods. It didn’t help that the two time lines made you work a bit to keep track of things.

The NYTimes reviewer agreed with me, although he is much more critical. He wrote, “it … went in for lush atmospherics, for a lot of rustling leaves” and “[m]urder and unwanted sex are primal drivers of narrative … [but] the characters are so one-dimensional and overwrought that the force of neither driver lands.”

It’s strange to come to this conclusion when some of the descriptions that were TOO MUCH were written with gorgeous prose.

It was interesting, by the way, to read a novel that does what I have been criticized of doing. Have I mentioned this before? I like atmospherics and can go on for pages (the light on the river, dusk gathering in the dewberry bushes, etc) leaving the plot (what plot?) to languish. In my third major edit, I searched the word “clouds” in order to strike out more than half of the (endless) descriptions of the sky.

Now Saunders I read because he really knows how to play with form (think: Lincoln in the Bardo). He does so here with a lot of skill, even inventing a grammar for one of his characters (see below). Didn’t love these stories however and that may be a question of preference — the reliance on dystopian plots and details just didn’t grab me. Sometimes I’m a fan of that. Not here.

What were two of the best books you read in 2023?

Pattern and Outrage : Dee Mallon

cloth, justice, writing, and food