An Embarrassment of Riches

Fascinating Features - by Katie

Welcome to our new blogger Katie, who has lived in Portland most of her life and never thought her high school library job would evolve into a lifelong (hopefully!) career. She worked as a news writer and reporter in a previous life and especially appreciates efficient, powerful writing. She also loves music, documentaries, quirky characters, stories of triumph over adversity, dogs, and tap dancing.

Produce clear, concise copy - that was my task as a college intern in a radio news department. I spent several hours a day rewriting news wire content. Like many aspiring journalists, I dreamed of writing feature stories – genuine human interest pieces that allowed the freedom to tell a story or make a point in more than one to two paragraphs. These are the kinds of stories you will find in The Fiddler in the Subway by Gene Weingarten.

Weingarten is a Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer and humor columnist for The Washington Post. The Fiddler in the Subway collects some of his best work into one not-to-be-missed volume. The book’s title comes from one of the pieces for which Weingarten won a Pulitzer. The idea behind the story was to conduct an experiment. Place a world-renowned violinist, Joshua Bell, in a busy Washington, D.C. subway station, with some loose change in his nearby violin case. How would passersby react? Would they recognize this top-notch musician in his jeans, t-shirt and baseball cap? More importantly, would they know and appreciate the quality and beauty of the music? The story reveals much about the power of context and the way in which people move through their busy lives, often oblivious to what is happening around them. Joshua Bell, who plays a Stradivarius violin worth more than three million dollars and fills concert halls the world over, made about $32 dollars that day. Of the 1,097 people who passed by Bell that January morning, seven of them stopped to listen for at least a minute.

Now, I suppose you could draw some doom-and-gloom conclusions about the state of humanity from this story. But Weingarten doesn’t do that at all. He doesn’t do that in any of his pieces. He simply observes the human condition in a variety of settings and circumstances, and writes about it, completely engaging and entertaining the reader along the way. Weingarten is a humor writer after all, and the way he describes many of his subjects will have you laughing out loud.  Take “The Great Zucchini,” the story of a much sought-after children’s entertainer who commands $300 per birthday party and does things like pour water on his head and eat toilet paper. What is it about this college dropout with no fancy costumes or props that has him booked solid months in advance? Weingarten is determined to find out, and he does, revealing a somewhat complicated but entirely human character who relates to children on their own level.

The Fiddler in the Subway offers many other gems, including the story of the ghost writer of the Hardy Boys novels, a profile of the intensely private cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and the search for the city most deserving of the official “Armpit of America” title. Weingarten’s diverse collection of well-written stories proves that truth can indeed be stranger than fiction, and just as entertaining.

You can listen to Joshua Bell playing Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” one of the pieces he played in the subway station, on his Voice of the Violin CD.  You can also download Joshua Bell’s music through Freegal, a free music service available to library card holders.  

Captain Slocum's Circumnavigated World - by Helen

Ever since our stay at the Slocum house in West Tisbury on Martha's Vineyard, I've been curious about the life and voyages of Joshua Slocum. I feel lucky that I chanced upon The Hard Way Around: The Passages of Joshua Slocum by Geoffrey Wolff.

It is a wonderful tale of adventure, luck, skill and derring-do. I appreciate the way that Mr. Wolff incorporates history, literary allusions and his own personality into the story. Sometimes an author's intrusion into a story is distracting, but I found the story enhanced by Mr. Wolff's comments and footnotes.

This is one of those books that give you a real sense of the time and place -- sailing for profit is giving way to shipping by steamship. The old ways are again being replaced by the new.

The Brooklyn Bridge has just been completed and Slocum's son remembers the workmen dabbing the topmost masthead of his father's ship the Northern Light by a playful bridge workman. I love that Mr. Wolff stops the story of Slocum to give us a very brief look at the Brooklyn Bridge complete with an excerpt from Hart Crane's poem "To the Brooklyn Bridge".  

A few pages later, Slocum is sailing the Northern Light between Java and Sumatra while Krakatoa is in full eruption. The sea is boiling and "fretting about the ever-changing depth, Slocum ordered the lead line cast, and it came up from the bottom with its tallowed tip melted." Details like this add so much to the reader's enjoyment.

Slocum endures many trials and much controversy, both on land and on the sea -- from mutiny to squalls and battles over payment to some people's disbelief in his solo voyage.  

Much is made of Slocum's love of reading, his shipboard library and his writing skills. Enough examples are given that I now must turn to Slocum's own words in Sailing Alone Around the World.

"I Reject your Reality and Substitute my Own" - by Tama I'm probably coming late to the party, but are any of you as madly in love with Mythbusters as I am? My 7-year-old and I have been watching them all summer long. I'd tried to get him interested a while back and it didn't take, but I got him with the episode titled Helium Football--what kid wouldn't be overjoyed to hear the helium voice for the first time? He was hooked.

But, I love them too, for loads of reasons: Because I'm a science-y sort, because the people on the show are so smart and cute, because they show a logical progression in their proof process, because they shop at places like that cool aircraft surplus warehouse where they got the vacuum toilet, because they have that giant, highly organized shop full of industrial shelving with boxes and bins of tools and hardware and toys and stuff, and because they have those awesome panel trucks that just say M-5 on the side. Very undercover.

My favorite episodes: Tesla's Earthquake Machine, Mentos/Diet Coke, Hindenburg Disaster, and Killer Whirlpool, all from collection 2.

My son's favorite episodes: Helium Football, Crimes and Mythdemeanors, Killer Whirlpool, and the two different Ninja shows.

There are a few episodes that involve alcohol consumption which may not be appropriate for children, depending on your kiddos age, but are hilarious for adults.

If you love the Mythbusters too, won't you send in a 'Suggestion for Purchase' for the seasons that we do not own yet at MCL? We currently have 1-5, and have ordered 6 and 7, but really we should have them all. C'mon. You know you want them, too.

Don't Worry, Be Happy - by Ruth Every so often over the course of my life, I've pondered my happiness. Sometimes (during most of graduate school), I was decidedly NOT happy. Other times (say, when I'm hanging out at my favorite place at the beach reading or crafting), I feel quite peachy. Gretchen Rubin asked herself whether she was happy and came up with something like "Yes, but I could be happier." That question (and answer) began a year long quest to create more happiness in her life. It's not the totally self-indulgent project that it initially seems to be; she realized that if she were happier, the people around her (like her husband and kids) would also be happier. She designed a project for each month of the year starting with decluttering her apartment in January. Other endeavors included eating less "fake food", writing a novel in one month, and tackling nagging tasks. To find out if she did, indeed, get happy, read The Happiness Project.

Unlike Gretchen, who made a conscious choice to be happier, Dominique Browning's shift toward happiness was forced upon her when House & Garden, the magazine for which she was the editor, folded. Fortunately she had resources, unlike so many Americans who have lost their jobs and are up Unemployment Creek without a paddle. Dominique basically slowed life down - sold her big house in New York and moved to a smaller one in Rhode Island where she lived in her pajamas, gardened, swam and, apparently, finally got over her decade-long, on-again, off-again relationship with a man whom she dubbed Stroller. She was going to call him Walker, "as that's what he did best: walked away", but apparently he objected. She relates her year in Slow Love.

Now don't you wish you had a whole year of freedom (with financial resources) to get all happy and content?

What We're Reading Now

Zoe is reading the laugh-out-loud funny 52 Loaves, about a man who sets out to bake the perfect loaf of bread from scratch. This entails traveling around the world to see how bread is baked in other countries, planting the wheat, harvesting, winnowing and on....

Zoe is a delivery driver for the library system.

What We're Reading Now

Larry just finished John McPhee's Levels of the Game and wanted another tennis read.  He is now reading the gripping  Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi.

Larry is a librarian at the Hollywood Library.

On Grief and Making Toast - by Helen Sometimes I think that I am drawn to books of sorrow. Rather, maybe, I am more attracted to how people survive and work out their grief.

Perhaps it was too soon for the author to write of his daughter Amy's untimely death from heart failure at age 38.  Making Toast: a Family Story by Roger Rosenblatt is so filled with raw sorrow, a touch of bitterness and tender stories of helping to raise three young grandchildren. The children call him, Boppo, and his wife, Ginny becomes Mimi as their lives are forever changed.

Roger Rosenblatt may be familiar from his columns in The Washington Post or Time Magazine. He is also a Professor of English and Writing at Stony Brook University and the author of the hilarious novel, Lapham Rising.

Facing this terrible loss is torture, but caring for the children becomes a joy.

Always the teacher, Boppo gives the children a new word each morning to mull and savor. These 'Word of the Morning' stories sprinkled throughout the book and the quiet way that the Rosenblatts instill a love of reading are some of my favorite parts of this memoir. Bubbies, the youngest child, is just under two. One evening just before bedtime, Bubbies points to one of the books in the den and says, "book." It is a copy of The Letters of James Joyce, but Boppo takes the book down and instead reads a story of Bubbies' adventure on the playground.

    "I try to put back the book, but he detects an implicit announcement of his bedtime, and he protests. "Joyce!" he says. Eventually, he resigns himself to the end of his day. He puts the book back himself, and quietly says, "Joyce."

Ginny puts her feelings into the startling poem "Arch of Shade" as she grapples with leading her daughter's life by caring for the children.

    Arch of Shade

    Rachmaninoff and Mozart
    Sift through the haze
    On River Road.
    Two hatted women wait
    In the heat for the Ride-on-Bus.
    The Wii is the summer wish
    Come true.
    Your babies' crib is disassembled
    And taken away
    Accepted
    With gratitude
    To be the bed for a new life.

    I am turning
    To the camp carpool line
    Only thinking of you.
    The arch of shade hovers
    The hot July sun rays
    Dapple the leaf arch
    To highlight the darkness.

    I am here.

Roger astutely comments on his wife and her poetry; "Her graciousness distracts people from noticing that she is alert to life's dark places. She prefers it that way. Her poems hit their mark, but gently. They crack the egg without breaking it."  

Making Toast will both break your heart and show you what is possible in dealing with grief.

No One Writes Like James Herriot - by Nicola

No one writes like James Herriot...
…except, of course, James Herriot himself, who passed away in 1995. If you're looking for more good animal stories, there are some recent ones out there that you may enjoy reading.

Nick Trout’s Tell Me Where it Hurts:  A Day of Humor, Healing and Hope in my Life as an Animal Surgeon will leave you alternately laughing and crying until you begin to wonder if you have lost your mind. (For more on this title see our previous review here.)  In a similar vein, you may want to try All My Patients Have Tales:  Favorite Stories from a Vet’s Practice, by Jeff Wells. Fresh out of veterinary school, Wells settled in South Dakota where he treated a variety of problems.  Several animals were not as cautious as they should have been around porcupines. The quills became embedded in their flesh and were difficult for Wells to remove, causing a great deal of anxiety for both him and his patients. Then he had a male cat with the classic symptoms of pregnancy!  If that didn’t make him question his career choice, the pet owners were always advising him on their animals treatment. They always thought they knew better.
 
If you like cats, try Dewey: The Small-town Library Cat who Touched the World, by Vicki Myron. It was 1988 and the coldest night of the year in Spencer, Iowa. Dewey was dropped into the book drop of the Spencer Public Library by some unknown miscreant. Iowa has cruel winters and Dewey developed frostbite while trapped in the book drop.  He was only four weeks old and his eyes hadn’t opened yet. Luckily, the next morning he was found by the author who was also the director of the library. Dewey recovered from his ordeal and charmed the patrons and staff of Spencer Public Library. He seemed to sense when one of the patrons needed special attention and went directly to that person to offer comfort. Not surprisingly, Dewey soon became the official mascot of the library.

If you have a soft spot for animals rescued from rather sad conditions, you may want to read Chosen by a Horse: A Memoir, by Susan Richards. Richards went to adopt a horse rescued from an owner who took very poor care of him. When she opened the door of her horse trailer at the adoption center, she was quite surprised to see one of the horses stride into the trailer before she had even had time to blink. That horse was the one who went home with her. Their relationship flourished and became mutually beneficial and nurturing.

Whether you like owls or not, you may enjoy Stacey O’Brien’s Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and his Girl. O’Brien was a student researcher at Caltech when an injured baby owl was brought in. The owl could not be rehabilitated and sent back into the wild again so O’Brien decided to adopt him. She provides insight into the human-animal bond and many interesting facts about owls.  However, if you think the book sounds dry, you may be pleasantly surprised to find yourself wanting to laugh out loud. As Wesley reached sexual maturity he was like a young human teenager who did not know how to handle the changes in his body. Stacey became the object of his affection in a new and different way. 

No one writes quite like James Herriot, but perhaps you'll find some good reading here.
 

What We're Reading Now

Francie is reading The Other End of the Leash by Patricia B. McConnell. She sheds light on the way our dogs see us and provides guidance for better communication with your very best friend.

Francie is a librarian at the Central library.

What We're Reading Now

Jane is reading The Food of a Younger Land, edited by Mark Kurlansky. Kurlansky picks up the baton of the dropped WPA project "America Eats", pulling together the submissions of recipes, anecdotes and photos from all across America in the 30s to early 40s. It's an amazing eye-opener of how quickly things have changed in our world!

Jane coordinates classes and training for staff and patrons.

Plumbing the Depths of a Good Story - by Ruth Sometimes once is not enough for me - seeing the movie Amadeus over and over again, eating corn on the cob four days in a row when it's in season, visiting Britain multiple times, walking along Nye Beach, and hiking in the Columbia Gorge.  For some authors, writing a story just once is not enough.  In recent years, a number of books for teens and kids have come out that are based on books written for adults.  This week I read a fantastic book for older kids and teens called Chasing Lincoln's Killer by James Swanson which is based on his Edgar Award winning book Manhunt: The Twelve Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer. Swanson first describes the days leading up to the assassination, the prior plot to kidnap Lincoln, and the final plan to kill three of the most important political players of the day:  President Abraham Lincoln, Vice-President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William H. Seward.  He then takes the reader through the assassination and assassination attempts, the various get-aways, the eventual discovery of the culprits and their fates.  He gives just the right amount of detail about the major figures in the story, keeps the action moving, and provides well-placed illustrations including photos of the people involved, newspaper clippings and a map detailing the route of the assassins. 194 pages was probably enough for me, but if you want the full scoop, you can read all 448 pages of Manhunt.

Several other non-fiction adult books and their younger companions to check out are:
Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex and Revenge of the Whale: The True Story of the Whaleship Essex
Mark Kurlansky's Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World and The Cod's Tale
Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal and Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food

What We're Reading Now

Steve is reading Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono and is learning how to think both more thoroughly and more quickly when making good business decisions.

Steve works on maintaining and improving the library catalog.

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.

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.