An Embarrassment of Riches

Drawn To It - by Steve

I used to be a voracious reader. My time spent riding the bus everywhere usually involved a thick novel balanced carefully on my lap. However, with summer creeping slowly closer, I have been riding my bike more and my reading time has been trimmed considerably. I find myself turning to graphic novels more often to get a great story, but in a condensed version.

I discovered FreakAngels by accident. Warren Ellis is truly an icon when it comes to graphic novels. I read his first full-length novel, Crooked Little Vein, a while back, thoroughly enjoying every word. When I saw that he was working on a new online webcomic, I had to check it out.  Each Friday, I get a little delivery of genius to my RSS reader.  FreakAngels is an excellent post-apocalyptic tale of survival. The twelve main characters, each with their own special ability, were the cause of something cataclysmic for which they're now trying to repay humanity. Murder, mayhem, and community gardening: a match made in heaven. Lucky for me, the second volume was recently added to our collection.

Speaking of murder, Whiteout takes place in Antarctica where the U.S. Marshall stationed there to keep the peace has to solve a gruesome murder. Then another. Then the killer comes after her. Will she survive the incoming storm while running for her life? Yes, because there’s a volume two. Greg Rucka’s storytelling is dark, and Steve Leiber’s illustrations match the writing perfectly.

I recently finished the first volume of Bayou by Jeremy Love. Another book that started as a webcomic, this lilting story from the Antebellum South follows a special girl trying to clear her father’s name. He’s been lynched for abducting a white girl, but she saw what really happened, and knows that it was actually a monster.  She travels to a bizarre land where she befriends a hulking giant.  Unfortunately, the story ends as they start their quest together, but I managed to track down the whole story on the site where the comic first started.

Another Short Walk - by Tama A couple weeks ago I was browsing at Powell’s on Hawthorne and a book on that awesome remainder section caught my eye. The Cactus Eaters: How I Almost Lost My Mind—and Almost Found Myself—on the Pacific Crest Trail by Dan White.  I loved Bill Bryson’s book on the Appalachian Trail, A Walk in the Woods, and if this was anything like it, it’d be good, at the very least. I put it on hold the next morning.

Dan White and his girlfriend of several months decide to leave behind their dead end reporting jobs to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. Their hope is that it will deepen their still new relationship, make them stronger people and all that. They spend hundreds of dollars on great equipment and their favorite snack foods, and even though they're getting off to a late start (meaning June) they figure that if they can knock off sixteen mile days for six months they’ll finish before the weather turns—sounds iffy. How many miles will they walk, theoretically? Two thousand six hundred and fifty from Mexico to Canada.

They’re given a one-night short-course by a couple of people who’ve already hiked the PCT. They recommend dividing it into twenty-five segments. At the beginning and end of each segment they’ll leave the trail and resupply at designated towns nearby. They will mail twenty five boxes of dried food to themselves addressed to General Delivery at post offices near the trail heads. They’re given a list of “trail angels” who live in the supply towns--folks who let hikers sleep at their house for free, give rides, even schlep water to the desperate. Sounds doable if you’re organized.

So far it’s the funniest book of my still new summer reading season. I’ve forced friends and loved ones to listen to entire paragraphs. The other day I was laughing so hard it actually made my son pause Lego Star Wars II to ask if I was ok. I couldn’t wait to finish it yet I was sad when I did, and in my world that is the sign of an excellent book.

Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that the ending was not what I expected, but it was real and I give Dan White credit for that. The joy of the book for me was in the trek itself. The lesson for me was the reminder that it’s good to be honest and be yourself, even if it’s hard sometimes.

Haunted by Choice - by Jen As Americans we demand choices. Choice equals happiness.

Or does it?

I have an un-American confession: sometimes I'm sick to death of choosing. That secret forced-to-wear-a-uniform-to-school envy I harbored as an ordinary public school kid washes over me once again. I want the choice made for me. Or no choice at all. It's just easier that way.

My happiest summer vacations at a kid were spent stuck at cousins' houses in rural parts of Washington and New Mexico. There was no roster of camps, lessons, or play dates. The only scheduled activity was go play. We poked at anthills with sticks, picked blackberries until we were covered in blood and juice, read the same two ratty books over and over because they were the only books lying around. There was nothin' to do and it was pretty rockin' great.

I can make a great argument for single-payer health care, but I'm more likely to sound off about the drinks in the vending machine at work (twenty-eight varieties of sugar water but not a single root beer.) Recently I started whittling the choices I offer to Child the Elder. Hungry? Here's the one thing you can eat right now. Time to read a book before bed? Mommy's voice means Mommy's choice. He complains, sure, but secretly I think he's pleased with this totalitarian turn of events.

Summer is when I give myself a break and go back to the things I want to read repeatedly. Most people in high school are forced to read both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Shirley Jackson. They either become English majors or they run the other way, screaming, into their sensible adult lives and never discover both authors have written hilarious tears-will-leak-out-your-eyes memoirs about raising children.

Shirley Jackson's Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages are her fabulously funny accounts of surviving life with four children as a professor's wife in the 1950's. She is a woman who treats hospital childbirth as a well-deserved vacation and flips a coin with her husband to decide who will talk to the detested teacher during Parent's Visiting Week. She is a one-woman taxi service minus modern car seats and has sarcastic conversations with clueless college students:

"Certainly," I said. "My only desire was to be a faculty wife. I used to sit at my casement window, half embroidering, half dreaming, and long for Professor Right."

"I suppose," she said, "that you are better off than you would have been. Not married at all or anything."

"I was a penniless governess in a big house," I said. "I was ready to take anything that moved."

"And of course you do make a nice home for your husband. Someplace to come back to, and everything so neat."

"My spinning lacks finesse," I said. "But I yield to no one on my stone-ground meal."

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny is a personal diary extract and will show you a side of Hawthorne you never dreamed existed. Think of the guy who wrote the Scarlet Letter. Now think of that same guy stuck at home taking care of a spirited five-year-old while his wife is away. He is alone and this is his debut as a single parent. In Hawthorne's experience this includes application of curling tongs to the tot's hair with predictably poor results and encouraging the boy to, um, evacuate his bodily waste on the property of the neighboring Shakers. Hawthorne didn't like the Shakers.  

Lucky for us, they wrote all of this down. Jackson and Hawthorne both knew the value of a good haunting but probably never intended to haunt me with their quirky parenting. Now they can haunt you, too.

Go play. And don't come back until I call you for dinner.

Not of This World - by Steve

Ever have one of those days? You know the type where you feel like everything is just a bit off. You miss the bus even though you left five minutes early.You spill coffee on your new white linen, short-sleeve Oxford shirt.Your cell phone reception is nonexistent even though you’re standing in the middle of downtown. Maybe you’re just having a bad morning, or perhaps you’ve been secretly transported to an alternate version of Earth. 

I love when a story seems normal, yet there’s something I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s not until I’m really engrossed in the tale that I figure out that the world is a different place from where I grew up. They’re not science fiction, per se, but contain just enough of a difference to be noticeable.  Here are a few of my favorite examples of these types of stories.

The Walls of the Universe by Paul Melko starts in a small country town. A teenage boy is confronted by his doppelgänger who offers him a trip to an alternate world. Turns out, the trip was one-way. He makes a life in the new world by inventing a new game called “Pinball,” but gets noticed by a shady corporation who wants to rule the world.

Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo is one of the most unique books I’ve ever read. Translated from the Finnish, it tells the story of a guy who rescues and cares for a troll that has been badly beaten. The author does a great job of making it seem like trolls actually exist, and when the main character bites off more than he can chew, bad things really start happening.

All In the Family - by Tama

I’ve been in a bit of a book funk lately. Just can’t seem to find a really good one--you know, the kind that makes you excited to get back to it when you’ve had to put it down. The kind where all you want to do it sit and read for a few gloriously uninterrupted hours. The kind that you’re bummed to finish because there’s no way the next one will live up to it and only disappointment lies ahead. I want a book like that.

I can’t recall how the Spellmans came into my life--probably a review in some library journal. It doesn’t matter because they’ve saved me. In The Spellman Files, by Lisa Lutz, we meet Izzy Spellman, age 28. Izzy has a much younger sister, Rae, and a chronically perfect, type-A older brother, David. The kids have been brought up in the family business of private investigation, to either their benefit or detriment, depending on the kid. David is an overachiever who ran far and fast from the family business as soon as he could to become a high-powered attorney. Rae, age 14, is chronically addicted to recreational surveillance and sugary food items. Izzy, the middle child, has attended multiple colleges and universities without completing a degree, can’t seem to hold down a “normal” job, has a past littered with romantic mistakes and slightly excessive drinking, and prefers to enter and exit the family home via windows rather than doors. Mom and Dad just try to maintain some sense of sanity and keep the business afloat as they squeeze in the occasional “disappearance” of their own, family code for a weekend away by themselves.
 
Curse of the Spellmans has been nominated both for an Edgar Award and a Macavity Award, and those of you who read mysteries know what a big deal that is. And honestly, I liked the other two in the series better, so that tells you how good they really are.

One reviewer called the series “Harriet the Spy for grownups” another says “part Columbo, part nightmarish Nancy Drew.” Whatever. It’s always a starred review no matter who's doing the reviewing, which in the book biz means you need to pay attention because people are gonna be asking for it. And for good reason.

There’s talk that a Spellman movie is in the works but we all know that the books are always better.

www.lisalutz.com
 

One Memoir, Over Easy - by Ruth A former boyfriend of mine was a great cook, and I was only allowed in the kitchen when it was time to do the dishes. This worked well for me, as I like to eat tasty food without putting in a lot of effort, and I don't mind plunging my hands in warm, sudsy water.  I was finally eating some meals that had more than five ingredients! So after we broke up, I went back to my standard Trader Joe's fare of spinach salads and heat and eat entrees. To say I had no interest in spending hours cooking something that would take only minutes to consume would be a vast understatement. I had better things to do with my life. Giulia Melucci's dating experience, chronicled in I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti was the exact opposite of mine: she loves to cook and prepared some pretty yummy dishes for the parade of boyfriends that began when she was in her early twenties. Yummy things (recipes are included) like "Risotto with Intricately Layered Hearts", "Pear Cake for Friends with Benefits", "Salmon with Lemon-Tarragon Butter", "Morning After Pumpkin Bread" and the one that I'm going to try out on my boyfriend:  "Lachlan's Rigatoni with Eggplant". Because, you see, I'm now with someone who actually enjoys it when I prepare meals (he helps, too, and also recently fixed the best grilled cheese sandwich I have ever eaten), and I've discovered how much fun it is to cook for someone besides myself. Guilia got that from the beginning and, with the exception of one guy who was sort of lukewarm on the whole food thing, her boyfriends all seemed happy with her culinary skills.  Never happy enough, alas, to give her the one thing she craved: a marriage proposal. We meet Ethan who, after three years, was given an ultimatum and declined to offer a lifetime together; Mitch Smith who, not very many years after they broke up ("I didn't want a girlfriend or whatever."); ended up marrying someone else, and Lachlan, a Scotsman who was passionate…about food. As we leave Giulia, she's still unwed but doesn't seem too downhearted. Optimism, like cooking, seems to come easy to her.

An Autodidact's Delight - by Alison

The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. I'm often reminded of this phrase when I look at the sheer amount of material the library houses, on such a wide range of topics. The other day I came across a DVD called The Art of Requeening. Was it a new method for playing chess? A treatise on the politics of filling royal vacancies? Actually, it turned out to be about bee culture and honeybee breeding. Who knew there was such a thing, and that the library owns it?

That's just the beginning. My friend borrowed a copy of The Bodhrán DVD, in hopes of learning the ancient art of celtic drumming. I've gotten some good out of the video course Understanding the Fundamentals of Music from the Teaching Company, publishers of CD and DVD lectures by professors from universities across the country. Another friend built a lovely bookcase by studying the art of biscuit joinery.

So what do you want to study? Want to learn fingerstyle guitar, Bollywood dancing, Hula, magic tricks East Coast Swing, the art of spey casting? There's a DVD for that. Maybe you want the Monks of New Skete to show you how to make your dog behave? There's a DVD for that. Perhaps you've been hunting and would now like to learn how to tan that deer you bagged? There's a DVD for that. You can even learn 5 string banjo from the inimitable Pete Seeger. Browse our whole list of instructional videos. Maybe you'll discover a talent you never knew you had.

PDX sounds good - Loch Lomond - by Alison

The first time I heard Loch Lomond it was amazing I could hear them at all. The local band was playing the Pickathon festival when the sound system died. The audience responded by getting as close as possible to the stage. From there it was possible to hear all the nuances of the music and admire the range of instruments - including melodica, clarinet and vibraphone. It was fun to watch the looks passing between the band members as they did their best to give a good show under the circumstances. The sight-seeing planes circling overhead didn't help with the acoustics and yet the audience was charmed anyway.

Loch Lomond's music has been described as "mesmerizing" and "lush". Lead singer Ritchie Young has an ethereal voice that seems to float above the music. The songs move from sweet and dreamy to sinister - what does he mean "the sounds of children laughing makes my eyes bleed"? For a visual representation of the music's sense of mystery and foreboding, go to their MySpace page and take a look at the video for "Blue Lead Fences" from their soon to be released album.
It's hard to pin down exactly what genre Loch Lomond falls into. Though I love all those descriptions that music critics come up with (otherworldy folk? circus pop? chamber folk?), maybe you should just have a listen for yourself.

Good Goth! - by Ruth

I love a good gothic novel, but new ones have been scarce since the genre went out of fashion a couple of decades ago.  What's a girl to do when she's read all of Daphne Du Maurier, Mary Stewart and Barbara Michaels?  So I was incredibly pleased to find a brand spanking new AND excellent book that matched my idea of a gothic: The Séance by John Harwood.  It all begins with the death of a young girl, the mother's overwhelming grief and the elder, surviving daughter's need to alleviate that grief.  But, of course, there's a back story and, of course, it involves a sinister man, a decrepit mansion, a romance, a woman (possibly) in peril, and a supernatural element.  It's convoluted and told from multiple points of view and just oh so delicious!

Mystery on Martha's Vineyard - by Helen

Several summers ago, our friends invited us to spend a week with them on Martha's Vineyard. They rent the Joshua Slocum house for the month of August. I have since discovered the mysteries of two of the island's writers, the late Philip R. Craig and Cynthia Riggs.

Solving the mystery is not the point of these stories. Learning the lore of the Vineyard is. I find it fun to read references to the beetlebung tree, West Tisbury, East Chop, the ferry to Chappaquiddick and all the little ponds and side roads that are so much a part of the island.

Craig writes with a touch of humor and real love of the island, the fishing, and the swarms of summer visitors that clog the roads. His main character J. W. Jackson, a retired Boston cop, now lives year around on the island and does odd jobs to support his wife and two children. He loves to fish and to cook and to sit on the balcony with drink in hand watching the ocean. Jackson's signature saying is delish (either preceded or followed by a recipe).

In one of the books, Jackson drops by Victoria Trumbull's house to check on her reaction to a case that he is investigating. Victoria Trumbull is the 92-year-old detective in the mysteries by Cynthia Riggs. Victoria is a feisty character who uses her knowledge of  the feuds and families and forebears of the residents of West Tisbury to help out the local police.

In his latest book, Third Strike, Philip Craig has teamed up with William G. Tapply, author of the Brady Coyne mysteries. Brady, a Boston lawyer, gets a call from a former client who tells him about mysterious crates loaded and unloaded at midnight on the island. Coyne and Jackson team up to crack the case of a crime with international ramifications.

Delish!

I Love L.A. - by Markrid

A few things about Los Angeles.

The ocean is always cold and rough and full of riptides.

The backbone of L.A. County is made of steep wild mountains covered with sweet combustible chaparral, and sometimes also with snow, and within 20 minutes you can be right in among them from most of the 626 and 818 area codes.

Most of the movie-and-TV stuff happens in a very small part of the west side. “Everyone on the West Side is ‘on location’!” a friend said, describing the showbiz self-importance which tilts into the ridiculous.

In most of the county, though, there's a huge and vital kind of human plate tectonics going on: Latin America's cultures grinding against the Pacific Rim's. An excellent place to see this in action is at the Costco in Alhambra on a weekend afternoon.

No place else changes as fast. “I think I get it,” another friend said thoughtfully. We were sitting outside the Melrose Avenue Johnny Rocket’s, watching the highly embellished human parade. “You might as well have your art on the hoof.”

You are free to invent and re-invent yourself endlessly there, and people will mostly take you for whoever you say you are.

Poinsettias will grow into fair-sized trees, given the chance. If you spit a date pit over the side of the porch, a little palm tree might pop up. There are black widows in the garage, and in bad drought years tarantulas come out in the daytime. A flock of feral parrots can screech loud enough to blot out thought.

If you get off the freeway, you’ll find the most anonymous-looking suburbs have little time-warp Main Streets that will just break your heart.

A little more about LA:

Chavez Ravine is the area north of downtown where whole neighborhoods of Mexican-Americans were uprooted to make room for Dodger Stadium. It’s also the name of two great related works, the reissued 1949 album of Don Normark’s photographs documenting the vanished community, and Ry Cooder’s 2005 music CD on the same theme.

Nobody gets LA’s smudgy pink air and belief in magical possibilities as well as Francesca Lia Block. Her Weetzie Bat books for young adults, and Quakeland for grownups, have equal parts glitter, loneliness, hope, and strong female characters.

The electrifying documentary Rize shows African-American kids in South Central making beautiful community art - the dance form known as krumping - out of nothing but passion.

Follow the rise of the Crips in Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member.

Carolyn See is one of those authors who immediately seems like a favorite friend.

Her look at family weirdness in her memoir Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America is so recognizable that we all might have grown up next door to her; yet her blue-collar 1950s Eagle Rock - little stucco bungalows, cracked sidewalks, brown grass - is pure LA.

She also gives us a terrific, racy fable about art, survival, and finding one’s vocation in The Handyman, which may be the perfect LA novel: funny, breezy, and wise.

Epiphany Fic - by Alison

In the spring it's hard to resist the urge to turn the house upside down, plough up the garden and in general give everything a thorough cleaning. But what about those cobwebs in our brains? After spending many a dark and rainy day curled up with the likes of Cormac McCarthy and listening to The Smiths, spring just seems to require more redemptive reading. I like to call this epiphany fiction. These are the kind of books featuring protagonists undergoing life-changing events. With any luck maybe some of it rubs off on you, the reader.

One such is The Poet of Tolstoy Park by Sonny Brewer. Henry, a 67 year-old retiree and widower is told that he has a terminal illness. Determined to make the most of his last days, he sells everything and moves to a Utopian town in Alabama. There he tends to his soul and is surprised at the number of lessons he has to learn. It's a gentle read that celebrates community and self-reflection.

Equally enjoyable and a bit more complex, Philosophy Made Simple by Robert Hellenga tells the story of Rudy, an avocado dealer in Chicago. He too is a widower who has lost his bearings after the death of his wife. He should be contemplating retirement, but instead, in a move that stuns his children, he sells everything and buys an avocado farm in Texas. His only road map for this new life is a book - Philosophy Made Simple. As he reads about the great thinkers of history he tries to find meaning in his new life, which now includes the care of a painting elephant named Norma Jean. 

But my favorite epiphany fic choice of recent years is The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Pi Patel is a boy driven by curiosity. As a zoo-keeper's son, he's constantly studying animals. Unable to decide on one religion, he practices Hinduism, Christianity and Islam with equal fervor. When Pi is 16 his father decides that the family and the zoo will emigrate to Canada via cargo ship. The ship sinks and Pi is forced to share his lifeboat with the only other survivors, a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. What's a boy to do but to get really serious about the big questions of life and philosophy?

I hope I've given you a reasonable excuse to put down the mop and pick up a book. Happy spring and happy reading!

A Thing of Beauty - by Laural I bought a book. As a librarian I don’t normally admit that but it happens. I buy what I think is the best, what I can’t live without and borrow the rest. I borrowed from the library 1000 Jewelry Inspirations by Sandra Salamony. I was so enthused by the pieces in the book I had to own it.
I’ve been making jewelry for fifteen years - mostly simple necklaces, earrings, and bracelets with beads using the techniques of wirewrapping and softflex wire with crimp beads. If you make jewelry or you love looking at jewelry you will love this book!  Salamony includes full color photos of excellent pieces by 200+ creators. In all there are 1000 photographs of fantastic beaded art.  Most styles are covered: peyote stitch, ribbon chokers, wire wrapping, crimp beading, metal working, and bewitched materials made into ethereal concoctions. This is a confirmation that there are artists out there using pliers, needles, beads, blowtorches, metal, gems and ingenuity. They are creating amazing necklaces, earrings, and bracelets for the pleasure of jewelry wearers and the community at large.  Be inspired - take a look at this beautiful book.

Mankind and the Moon - by guest blogger Karen Brattain Our guest blogger is Karen Brattain, a freelance editor. She works for the scientific journal Astrobiology and has edited several books. She is a graduate of the Master's in Writing: Book Publishing program at Portland State University.

I tell everyone who will listen that I want to be the first copy editor in space. Two years of work for a journal that studies planets, moons, and stars has rubbed off on me and propelled my childhood interest in spaceflight to new heights.

Amazing spectacles fill the Cosmos. But I have come to feel that any story or study of the Universe is barren without us in it. The human element of space exploration—our ideas about what lies beyond, our attempts to discover it, and our thoughts about what we have discovered—is really the soul of space exploration. And the television series From the Earth to the Moon captures that soul.

Produced in part by Tom Hanks and Ron Howard, From the Earth to the Moon is a twelve-episode series that ran in the late 1990s. It brings to life the history of mankind’s journeys to, from, and on the Moon. I love that the series tells this story from a variety of perspectives. I am accustomed to seeing the Apollo astronauts as superstars; these episodes also stir me to admire the efforts of the ground crew, the spacecraft designers, the press, and the astronauts’ wives and families.

The first episode, “Can We Do This?” reveals the intense pressure of the space race. The plan to send Americans to the Moon began before we had even put an American in space; as a result, the Mercury and Gemini missions happen at breakneck speed. The consequences of this speed reach a climax in the next episode, “Apollo One,” which covers the devastating loss of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. This honest and deeply emotional episode hooked me on the series. It is an exceptional performance.

Since then, I have watched the Apollo 7 crew recover from tragedy to complete a successful mission, and I have celebrated as Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders orbited the Moon on Apollo 8. I am not finished with the series, so I am eager to see more. Indeed, it is taking an act of self-discipline for me to finish this review without popping in another episode.

If you want to test the water before diving into twelve episodes, I recommend the film Apollo 13. Directed by Ron Howard, Apollo 13 has an excellent cast, including Tom Hanks, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise, and Kathleen Quinlan. Spaceflight was never so real and suspenseful to me as it was when I watched this film for the first time. Now, after several viewings, I still feel that intensity. And I have developed a soft spot for Mission Control. One of the achievements of the film is that the cast breathes passion into highly technical language and concepts. One actor exclaims, “I need to know if the IU’s correcting for the Number 5 shutdown!” I’m on the edge of my seat!

The Apollo missions show us what humanity can achieve. As Jim Lovell says in Apollo 13, “We live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It’s not a miracle. We just decided to go.” Working for the common good uplifts us all. Apollo also reminds us how much we have and how valuable it is. Earth, seen from space, is a fragile and fantastic thing. Watch From the Earth to the Moon and Apollo 13. Learn about Earth, the Moon, and humanity.

"Observing with Passion" - by Helen In 1964, I started keeping a notebook of phrases, poems, and parts of books that I like. Needless to say, I have filled notebooks and still have little pieces of paper sticking out of books and tucked away in drawers. Years ago, I copied a poem by Mary Oliver called When Death Comes. I was particularly struck by this verse,

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

I like the idea of being "married to amazement".

When Winter Hours: A Book of Prose and Prose Poems by Oliver came across my desk, I had to read it.

One of the first things to strike me about her writing is how she sees, observes, notices -- and the quality of her sight. As I read further, I was on high alert to watch for more signs of seeing and sight. She says of other writers and thinkers, "Thus the great ones have taught me... -- to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always care-ingly."

Describing her own methods, she says, "I walk and I notice.  I am sensual in order to be spiritual. I look into everything without cutting into anything."

Another pleasure of this book is the essays on Poe, Robert Frost and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Mary Oliver is a close observer and reader. In her meditation on Poe, she states,"In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us. This is Poe's real story. As it is ours. And this is why we honor him, why we are fascinated far past the simple narratives. He writes about our own inescapable destiny."

One of the reasons that Mary Oliver is attracted to the poet, Robert Frost is that, "There is everywhere in Frost a sense that a man has time to look at things, to think and to feel." She writes a whole essay on Frost's two different messages, "everything is all right, say the metre and the rhyme, everything is not all right, say the words."  She feels that Frost writes of play and pleasure, wonder, reason and hope, "But the great height is not there. The sharp spilling of the soul into the whistling air- the pure spine-involved and organ-attached bliss - is not there."

Her own prose is often poetic, "The storm comes on an incoming tide; it therefore grows in power for the six hours of flashing tumble and shove toward us…. Indeed, what such fetch and wind in the rising tide do to the water of the surface is beautiful and dreadful. It shines, for the clouds are thin and racing by, and the light alters from gray to steel to a terrible flashing, a shirred, swarming surface."

Who can resist such stirring sentences!