An Embarrassment of Riches

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.

You Never Get What You Expect - by Tama

Since I was just a wee small library girl, one of my very favorite parts of going on a trip, no matter how far or near, how short or long, has been the ceremonial choosing of the books that will go with me. So for a mid-January trip to the Oregon Coast, what should I take? I pretty much had to take the book for February's book group--the pressure was on and I'd been procrastinating. And then, because resistance is futile, I threw in Strand: An Odyssey of Pacific Ocean Debris by Oregon author Bonnie Henderson. 

We arrived in Manzanita mid-afternoon, settled in, had an early dinner, and revved up the fireplace. There was a brief moment when I contemplated doing the responsible thing and diving into my assigned reading. Then, as I held a book in each hand, I got a delicious whiff of salty air and heard the roar of the ocean just outside. I went with Strand. It is a wonderful thing to have the perfect reading for a trip.

Back in '95 Henderson began volunteering for CoastWatch, a program of the Oregon Shores Conservation Coalition that monitors changes, natural and unnatural, on every inch of Oregon coastline. Volunteers adopt a mile of coast and agree to walk it at least four times a year, briefly reporting on changes they notice. She and a good friend walk their adjacent miles together, one bringing the sandwiches, the other the cookies. They begin to refer to themselves as Forensic CoastWatchers as they talk about what they find as they walk. And what they find is just the beginning of the story. It's Henderson's bloodhound spirit for the answer to "why is it here on the beach?" that makes the book so fascinating.

Some of what I learned from Strand is that:

Those thousands of little purplish-blue jellyfish washing up is something that happens every year.

Dead sea birds are everywhere. If you don't see them, you're just not looking.

The primo time for beachcombing is at high tide on a stormy night.

Japanese glass floats on the beach are an almost unbelievable treasure find here, but in Japan they're nothing special. Even less than nothing special.

Minke whales may be the most common whale off the Oregon Coast. That's right--Minke.

Container ships lose their cargo often, more often than they'd like you to know, and it sometimes washes up on NW beaches.

There is a sickeningly large floating "island" of all kinds of garbage in the North Pacific known as The Patch.

Henderson's writing has been likened to John McPhee, whom I worship. If that gets you to read this book, then that's great. But if you're not a McPhee Phan, please don't let that keep you from reading Strand. I would ask you this: Do you love the Pacific Northwest beaches? Good enough. You'll need to read this book. The chapters are short enough to be totally accessible yet include enough detail that the amateur science/nature geek in you will be totally satisfied. I was. Like a good shipwreck story? There's that too.

"Ultimately," Henderson says, "it was the stories I prized the most. Everything on the beach has one--every discarded bottle, every dead seabird chick. Even when you can't get the whole story, the quest becomes a story in itself. And in the end those are the best stories anyway."

Epilogue: I was at the coast for four days and finished Strand in three, although with no distractions it's definitely possible to do it in one. Did I start that book for the book group? No. Did I have guilt about it? Yes. But in classic English major fashion, I burned through it the day before our meeting. It was good. But Strand was great.

Bonnie Henderson will be reading from Strand at the Hollywood Library on Monday May 18th, at 6 p.m. Learn more about her work at her website www.bonniehendersonwrites.com

Genocide and a Failure of Imagination - by guest blogger Markrid

Our guest blogger is Markrid, a librarian at the Central Library downtown. She has worked in school, university, and public libraries since the late 1980s. She agrees with Orhan Pamuk, who said he distrusts incident, because it interferes with real life.

"As we were huddled, naked and freezing, in the huge courtyard, we could hear the roar of the ovens. Ash was falling on us. And I thought, Oh, good - they're baking bread for us."

The voice is gentle, the manner matter-of-fact. The elderly Hungarian woman speaking at the Museum of Tolerance is wearing  a short-sleeved dress on this summer afternoon, so the audience notices the line of numbers tattooed on her forearm.

As she spoke, the impulse to deny the Holocaust began to make some kind of emotional sense. Hungary's Jews were somewhat spared until near the end of the war, so they'd heard rumors of the camps for years. Finally, they too had been rounded up, shipped off, stripped of their belongings, shorn of their hair, and torn from their relatives; the worst had come; but even in the moment itself, for this woman the enormity of the Final Solution was too great to grasp.

Maybe they're baking bread for us! This survivor's story shows that a profound difficulty in confronting genocide is simply being able fully to imagine it; but history demands that we make the effort because we cannot forget - neither we nor those who come after us. 

Sometimes fiction seems to move one closer to the truth than fact.  The claustrophobic fear of occupied Amsterdam is invoked with dark subtlety in Harry Mulisch's novel The Assault, which creates an atmosphere of almost unbearable moral tension: which neighbor is secretly collaborating with the Nazis, and who is risking everything to resist them?   W.G. Sebald, brilliant and completely original, manages, in his strange, hypnotic masterpiece Austerlitz to convey both the loneliness of the Kindertransport and the grotesque horror of Theresienstadt, contrived as the Third Reich's "model" concentration camp. This book is in a class by itself.

Other times, only fact will do, and if one had to choose just a single book about the Holocaust to help make that imaginative leap, that book could well be Primo Levi's classic Survival in Auschwitz. Levi, a 25-year-old Italian chemist, set himself the task of documenting with scrupulous accuracy his experiences in the notorious camp. This short book vibrates: a very young man's wholehearted moral outrage suffuses the scientist's commitment to exact observation.

An unforgettable scene in Levi's book has a fellow prisoner begging him to recite poetry, the Dante he'd memorized as a schoolboy. The original Italian title of Survival in Auschwitz is perhaps better, Se questo e un uomo, or If this be a man: if the atrocities of the camps are uniquely human, so too is the transcendence of art and language. The poet Peter Balakian writes movingly of this passage in his article Poetry in Hell: Primo Levi and Dante at Auschwitz. Armenian-American Balakian's own coming-of-age meant gaining a gradual awareness of the horrors of the Armenian genocide of the early 20th century and its profound effects on his family, from which his well-meaning parents tried to shelter him. His memoir Black Dog of Fate begins as the story of a suburban boyhood and works to a crescendo of righteous anger.

To most of us, the Armenian world in the time of the massacres of 1915-1923 is a very foreign one. It comes a little closer in the moving memoir Efronia: an Armenian Love Story, which vividly fills in an old and complicated corner of the map.  A classic of accurate historical fiction, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,brought international attention to the destruction of Armenia with its story of heroic resistance fighters, .

Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is April 21 this year, and Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day comes on April 24 - good occasions to re-examine our historical imaginations, or to prod them into absorbing something new, since, unfortunately, there is enough human tragedy to keep us all learning. This is the year this blogger will finally tackle The Master and Margarita, among whose many complex strands is the Holodomor, the terrible genocidal famine Ukraine suffered in 1932-33.    

McPheeling Groovy - by Tama (read) I've been on a John McPhee jag lately. It started in about 1979 when an English prof handed me a copy of The Survival of the Bark Canoe while I waited for an appointment with my adviser. It wasn't like anything I'd ever read before. I loved the subject, and the writing even more.

Very recently I read Uncommon Carriers for book group. I loved the subject, and the writing even more. And I really get off on materials movement, to coin a library phrase. Moving stuff efficiently--cool. McPhee's chapter on UPS really floated my boat.

On finishing Carriers I wanted another McPhee title right then, didn't want to wait for the material to move, so I grabbed Looking for a Ship (1990) which was right there on the shelf. Even though it's almost twenty years old, and I knew next to nothing about the United States Merchant Marine, it was awesome. Again with the moving stuff around. Love it. Before I finished this one I put The Founding Fish on hold and it came from another branch with perfect timing. I finished the ship book and picked up the fish book. One of my "wish I coulda been a" professions is an ichthyologist, so I loved this also. But it's not about the fish--it's the writing.

Now I have to go back in time and reread The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975). It's been so long that it'll be like reading it for the first time. How did that English prof, whose name I can't even remember, know I'd like it? We talked for less than five minutes in a dusty half-basement hallway. Was it something I said? Was it a vibe he got from the enthusiastic brown haired girl madly in love the Transcendentalists? Doubtful. I'm pretty sure it was McPhee. The man can't write a bad sentence as far as I can tell. I don't normally make resolutions at the New Year--I feel like I'm setting myself up for failure--but I may make an exception this year. Maybe I'll resolve to read half of the books John McPhee has written to date. Hold on--I think that's something like 27 titles. Maybe I can read one third. How about if I just resolve to read everything he's written with no time-line? Yeah, that sounds good.

My Family and Other Books - by Ruth (read) One of my favorite books of last year is an oldie but a definite goody:  My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell.  I was finally motivated to read this book when PBS aired a movie version, and I almost never see a movie before reading the book it's based on.  Months later, I found out that it was a friend's favorite book, and he told me about other Durrell books he had enjoyed including two short story collections:  The Picnic and Other Inimitable Stories and Marrying Off Mother and Other Stories.  Durrell is a keen observer (as any naturalist should be!) of not only nature, but of family, friends and other people he comes across in his peripatetic life, and his delightful descriptions make for lots of fun reading.  My Family and Other Animals is about the time he spent with his mother and three siblings on the Greek island of Corfu in the 1930s.  Larry (I had a "Duh!" moment when it finally hit me that Larry was the novelist Lawrence Durrell, author of the Alexandria Quartet!) is querulous and self-absorbed, Leslie - the second eldest brother - will shoot anything that moves (and some things that don't), and Margo, the lone daughter, could be a teenage girl today, with her boyfriend troubles and diets.  Mother is vague and sweet, constantly mediating her family's quarrels while cooking a constant stream of tasty-sounding dishes.  Gerry delights in bugs and all other things in the natural world, and finds friends among the locals while enjoying his status as the youngest family member.  This early love of nature endured throughout Gerald's life - he became a well-known naturalist who established the Jersey Zoological Park, and a prolific author and TV personality. The other two books in the Corfu trilogy are Birds, Beasts and Relatives and Fauna and Family.  If you've never read Gerry, you're in for a treat!

A Modern James Herriot? - by Ruth

So I put myself on hold for Nick Trout's book ,  Tell Me Where it Hurts: A Day of Humor, Healing and Hope in My Life as an Animal Surgeon after reading a positive review of it somewhere, and fortuitously it came in right before my vacation. Trout is a veterinary surgeon at the Angell Animal Medical Center in Massachusetts, and although he's British, he's pretty far removed from the James Herriot I knew and loved in my youth through All Creatures Great and Small.  Trout focuses mostly on the dogs he's met and operated on and condenses a number of cases he's seen over the years into one day to give readers a sense of the urgency and adrenaline rush one might experience in a day working at Angell.  He begins with an early morning call that gets him out of bed and ends his day over fifteen hours later when friends of his child bring in a pet that needs some immediate attention.  Interspersed among the cases are Trout's ruminations on the practice and business of being a vet - issues that I had barely, if ever, considered over the years of taking my pet to the vet.  Questions of ethics and finance, cures versus palliative care - these are all noted in Trout's honest, if at times slightly condescending, voice.  Now that I make weekly visits to the vet with my elderly cat, the new insight has given me an even deeper appreciation for the doctors who work so hard to make sure our pets have the best possible care.

General Tso to Go - By Ruth

  When I was in high school, my mother and I used to go to The Chinese Kitchen on the odd Friday or Saturday evening.  I'd order spicy Mongolian Beef and she'd order a number of blander items such as Sweet and Sour Pork with its neon orange sauce and chow mein.  It was a tasty and inexpensive weekend treat, and we often headed there when I came home on weekends in college. Post-college, I was introduced to the mysteries of Dim Sum by a Chinese-Swedish boyfriend and finally learned how to use chopsticks! 

In the intervening years, I've become more fond of Thai and Vietnamese, and eschewed the seemingly less healthful and tasty Chinese  fare, but occasionally I get a hankering for Sesame Beef, General Tso's Chicken, or Egg Foo Yong.  I never thought much about the authenticity or origins of these menu items until I picked up Jennifer 8. Lee's entertaining and engrossing book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food.  Chop suey, I already had questions about, but imagine my shock when I learned that the crispy sweet tang of General Tso's chicken really belonged to another general!  And fortune cookies might possibly have come from Japan!  Really? 

Lee began her quest for the origins of America's favorite "Chinese" dishes when she heard the story of the multiple Powerball winners who had all chosen the same number because of a series of digits in a fortune cookie.  From there, she went on a multi-state, multi-national quest to find out what about Chinese-American food is truly Chinese, and why Americans have developed such an abiding taste for the cuisine.  Along the way, she uncovers fascinating factoids such as there are more Chinese restaurants than McDonalds in the US (in my neighborhood, it's 2-1 in favor of Chinese) and delves deeply into questions such as what is the connection between the Jewish and Chinese communities and what was the kosher duck scandal in the 1980s really about?  If you're not craving Pot Stickers and Broccoli Beef by the end of the book, I'll be surprised!

The Chocolate Underbelly - by Tama

Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America By Steve Almond
Here's a good read to relax with while glorying in our post-trick-or-treating rewards. This has to be one of the funniest nonfiction titles ever in the history of funny nonfiction. I read it a few years ago before Steve Almond was so hip and happenin', and reread it a few weeks ago as I was fighting off the April version of The Miserable Cold. I started laughing so hard on page 16 that it was over an hour, and a half box of tissues later that I finally stopped coughing, and got a grip on the hysteria. A few days later I texted a coworker at a library convention in Philly to ask if she'd bring me some Peanut Chews because they're raved about in the book and I thought they were only local to Philly (they're readily available other places now and fabulous). The book's not all fun and games. Almond gets more serious later on, but always with a humorous, self-deprecating undertone that's friendly and lovable. Powell's had the book remaindered a while back and I got it dirt cheap, but you should track it down and read page 16, if nothing else. Off you go.