Tag Archives: Friday Reads

There is nothing like a good mystery. 

While My Pretty One Knits is not exactly what I would call a good mystery. The murderer’s identity was obvious before the close of the first chapter. The village of Plum Harbor unequivocally fails to process – or even react much to — the brutal murder of one of their fellow villagers (it was brutal! And, as the book itself repeatedly reminds us, it was bloody!). There are enough knitting inaccuracies that unravel long enough to purl a swoncho. The knitting group doesn’t so much solve a murder so much as they stumble around talking about the murder, and incidentally and coincidentally facilitate the solving of the crime. And, as my fiancée put it with nothing but fondness, our dear anxious protagonist Lucy is “a bit touched in the head.”   

Yet I finished the book feeling…well, cozy.  

There were no high stakes (ignoring the fact that, had the murder gone unsolved, a cold-blooded killer would have gotten off scot-free). There was a dog (who did more work to solve the case than her human caretaker). There was knitting and humor. It was the cross between Hallmark and Lifetime that I’ve been seeking, even if the needles pointed more towards Hallmark. And it was, simply, fun.

Our core cast of characters include Maggie, the shop owner; Lucy, the newly divorced graphic designer; Dana, the psychologist; Suzanne, the real estate agent and mother; and Phoebe, the college student. There are many more characters, which helps the village feel populated, although in audiobook format it was difficult to keep everyone straight, and I eventually stopped trying. Familiarity will hopefully come with time.

I don’t hold out much hope that, as I continue the series, the ridiculously high statistics for murder per capita in Plum Harbor will be cause for concern. Luckily, the group has Suzanne. When the population dips down too low to support the village economy, they’ll have a head start on packing up and moving out.

I am, however, optimistic that the knitters of The Black Sheep will learn and change and grow. That’s what I’m interested in. And, I realize, as I frog back my snobbery; that’s what all cozy mystery aficionados are interested in. That’s what the writer is interested in. It was never about the mystery — it was about the characters.

And isn’t that warmer than a wool sweater?

Canadeo, Anne. While My Pretty One Knits. Pocket Books, 2009.

I’m currently 14 hours into listening to the audiobook edition of A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020), by David Sedaris. I have about three hours left and will be sad when it ends, which I’d say is a pretty good endorsement. Nevertheless, I suspect the most receptive audience for this title will be individuals who already know and adore Sedaris—either because they’ve read his previous books or heard him read from them in person or on public radio.

A Carnival of Snackery is actually Sedaris’s second diary volume. His first, Theft by Finding, covered the years 1977 through 2002. Sedaris’s diary entries aren’t deep dives into personal development, but in the first volume you can definitely observe his life unfolding. When it starts Sedaris is a 20-year-old college dropout, bouncing between bad jobs and bad apartments; when it ends he is a famous 45-year-old touring author, in a long-term relationship with boyfriend Hugh Hamrick.

By comparison, throughout the entirety of A Carnival of Snackery, which begins when Sedaris is 46 and ends just after his 64th birthday, his status doesn’t change—he’s still a famous, touring author and still with Hugh. As Sedaris, himself, writes in the introduction to A Carnival of Snackery, “Theft by Finding . . . had a narrative arc. ‘David Copperfield Sedaris,’ Hugh called it. If there’s an arc to this book, I don’t know what it is.”

Narrative arc isn’t the draw though. Instead, it’s the joy of spending time with someone who excels at sharing interesting observations and anecdotes from daily life. Sedaris begins each diary entry with a date and a location. And the number of locations from which he writes is astounding–countless U.S. cities, but also a surprising number of international ones (e.g., Perth, Tokyo, Odessa, Bucharest, Riga, Reykjavik, Dubai), representing stops on his various book tours. There are also recurring locales that reflect Sedaris’s various home bases—most notably Rackham, in West Sussex, England, where he and Hugh live, and Emerald Isle, North Carolina, where he vacations with his siblings in a beach house named the Sea Section.

Diary entries range in length from a couple sentences to a couple pages. Some record memorable jokes, which Sedaris regularly solicits from people in line at his book signings. Others consist of obnoxious sayings he sees printed on t-shirts. Most often, they feature snippets of conversations overheard while traveling, and also accounts of interactions he’s had with drivers, hotel staff, store clerks, barbers, flight attendants, and others he encounters on the road. He also writes about trash—specifically what he picks up with his grabber as he walks the roads of West Sussex. (He applies himself to this task so diligently he’s had a local garbage truck named after him.) Among the most poignant diary entries are those recounting conversations with his elderly father, whose dismissive attitude toward Sedaris clearly remains a source of pain. (Sedaris’s father died at the age of 98, several months after the last diary entry in this volume.) In the end, Sedaris’s diary excerpts teach us that an interesting and curious person can turn interactions and observations that most of us would consider boring and mundane into engaging snapshots.

Sedaris, David. A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020). Little, Brown and Company, 2021.

I picked up The Long Weekend from the new audiobook display at the library, and I got what I wanted: a fast-paced, engrossing thriller to listen to on a long drive. The cover boasts “Three couples, two bodies, one secret,” and by the end of the first disc, I had counted way more secrets than that. Also, one of my favorite ingredients in thrillers—is there something supernatural happening, or is one of the characters just trying to make it seem like there is? (Is that a shapeshifter lurking near the barrows, or is it just someone who’s not happy to see you?)

The Long Weekend is a story about well-off people being not that nice to each other, except it is British, so I guess I’d call them posh people. A group of friends plans a weekend getaway to the North of England, but some of them are planning more than others are, and betrayals overlap like a dense fog. There are enough twists and turns to keep me guessing, and enough humor to keep the story popping along. I appreciate Macmillan’s storytelling strategy, like how we know pretty quickly who committed a murder—but not who their victim is. The character newest to the friend group is jealous of the closeness of the others, but then we learn how the original friends in the group also feel estranged from each other. One character is shown to be quite ruthless and cunning—and then they are manipulated by another party outside of the friend group.

There are multiple characters narrating the action, and I wish the audio tracks had been edited to indicate that. The audio is all recorded by Olivia Poulet, who has a fantastic reading voice, but it would have been helpful to not have the character narration switch within tracks, because the listener regularly has to figure out which character is narrating, and a new track starting would have been a good way to indicate that switch in character narration. This is not as much of a problem as it sounds like it would be—as clever and twisty as the story is, there is a formula here, and nothing remains indecipherable. Macmillan knows how to give us information about the characters and their relationships in a paced way that keeps us interested in learning more.

Macmillan, G. (2022). The long weekend: A novel.

This book was released to coincide with the 50^th anniversary of NPR. After reading several biographies on Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Gloria Steinem, the gender discrimination incidents presented here were not revelatory; however, the history of each of the four women was worthwhile and interesting.

Their individual journeys to what their male counterparts contemptuously called the "Fallopian Jungle" (the female section of the newsroom) required tenacity and the willingness to work long hours learning on the job.

Unfortunately, one sentence derailed my experience with this book and lead me down a rabbit hole of research. In July 1974, Nina Totenberg, “polled 200 hundred people on the Hill” to write a story called “The Dumbest Congressman.”

“Among the dumb? Sen. Roman Hruska from Nebraska was so dumb he’d actually said that ‘mediocrity deserves a seat on the Supreme Court’ (Napoli, 109). I’m uncertain if this next sentence was in Totenberg’s article or added by Napoli but the charge against Hruska continues “(two strikes: Hruska owned a chain of dirty movie theaters, yet had sponsored an anti-smut bill.)” (109). Regardless who is calling out Hruska’s hypocrisy, what piqued my curiosity was getting to the bottom of the theater question. A Nebraska senator owning what I would interpret as pornographic theaters was something I’d never learned in my Nebraska history. Trust, but verify. A New York Times article  from 1970 titled “Rival Charges Hruska Peddles Smut” reveals there was more to the story:

In what may be the region’s bitterest election contest, Senator Roman L. Hruska of Nebraska, a noted opponent of violence and pornography, has been labeled a smut peddler and glorifier of brutality. The man who seeks to unseat him, former Gov. Frank B. Morrison, says the 66-year old Republican is using the screens of five drive-in movie theaters he partly owns in this area to show horror scenes in such films as The Blood Drinker and lewd situations in such works as Catch 22. Despite Senator Hruska’s continued explanation that he is merely an investor in a chain of Nebraska theaters and does not participate actively in the management (Mr. Morrison) continues to imply the Senator votes against pornography on the Senate floor but peddles smut in his theaters.” (Drummond Ayres Jr.)

An investor in several drive-in theaters definitely isn’t the same thing as owning a chain of dirty movie theaters. I called Kay Schmid, the director of the Roman Hruska Public Library. She provided the following political advertisement titled “At the Movies with Roman Hruska” published in the Columbus Telegram on October 30, 1970.  The advertisement quotes Jack Anderson of the Washington Post and was paid for The Concerned Citizens of Nebraska:

When Senator Roman Hruska preaches about the evils of violence and pornography, he knows whereof he speaks. He is a partner in a movie chain that has recently featured skin flicks like Girl on a Chain Gang and violence like The Blood Drinker. The pious Nebraskan has sponsored numerous bills against smut and violence but Hruska’s “common decency and good morals” apparently do not impel him when his pocketbook is affected. The senator wouldn’t say how much he gets out of the Douglas Theaters, except that it is “making a profit.” Asked whether he would make a public accounting, the crusader for public morality said, “Heaven’s No! It’s none of the public’s business as long as there is no conflict of interest.” Senator Hruska incidentally voted against a Senate Standards of Conduct Amendment, which would have required Senators to report their sources of income.

However, it was amassed, Hruska’s fortune was enough to have a public library (David City), a federal courthouse (Omaha), and law center (Lincoln), named for him. You can draw your own conclusions about Hruska’s values, but Napoli or Totenberg’s throwaway sentence about “owning a chain of dirty movie theaters” is inflammatory and inaccurate. It left me wondering if Napoli made any other statements that might require fact checking.

Napoli, Lisa. Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR. Blackstone Publishing. 2021.

Don’t all of us have at least one heartfelt wish? So does a little owl.

Set in medieval times, a young owl’s fondest dream is to become a knight.  To his family’s great surprise, he is accepted to Knight School.  (A number of knights had been disappearing lately.)  

He was smart and dedicated – he just had a little trouble with wielding a sword, or using even the smallest shield available.  He also did have some trouble staying awake during the day

After two weeks, they all graduate with honors. The illustration of his graduating class is hilarious.  Owl only comes up to the knee of the huge knight standing behind him. 

He was assigned the perfect job – Knight Night Watch.  It was not a problem for him to stay awake all night.  All was well until one night when he heard a strange sound.  It turned out to be a dragon who thought the owl looked tasty.  He was scared, but knights are brave and clever.  He was sure he could find a way out of this predicament.

An entertaining look at someone realizing their dream, facing a challenge, and hoping to succeed.  Humorous, with wonderful illustrations, this is a delightful picture book for reading aloud.  

Denise, Christopher. Knight Owl. Christy Ottaviano Books, 2022.  

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions.

“The Bright Eyes of Eleonora: Poe’s Dream of Recapturing the Impossible,” Upstream, 91.

Mary Oliver is a dear friend of mine.  

I do not mean, of course, that I have met her — or that I shall ever meet her (what a strange journey that should be!). But her words — her poems, her essays — sink deep into the blood-marrow of my bones, and I recognize on some thrum of instinct, kin. This is also not to say that ours is a kinship of talent; I shall not match Mary in writing (I think that she would say I would be a very poor writer, to only follow the paths she wandered).  

Upstream, published in 2016, three years before her death, is a collection of essays, the central conceit of all being nature and literature. I do not mean nature and literature in the way one, who might need to restock their pantry, might list bread, and then list cheese. It is bread and cheese, meant to be together, and one without the other would render the entire trip moot, for naught. It is the same way that Mary’s essays are about nature and literature. You simply cannot, she says, have one without the other. 

And what is the point of all this? — if one dares to ask a question. I set out to say that Upstream is a wonderful book on which to meditate — her collected work of poetry is like a Bible to me — but in re-reading the essay “Some Thoughts on Whitman,” I was struck by Mary’s line that “[Whitman’s methods were] to move the reader toward response rather than reflection” (94). Which is, of course, to say that Mary — a devotee of Whitman; I can think of no better word — has an intent to move us, the reader, to response! The hum through these pages is not to simply read this book, but to do so in public, out of doors, whooping in jubilation! 

In Upstream, the reader journeys through Five Parts of the collection; the two opening sections are crafted around nature, as are the two closing sections. Part Three seems to be the odd duckling out — it is about literature, and if one does not find amusement in literary criticism, this Part may cause the reader to drag their heels. (I myself skimmed through the essay on Poe.) But, turning that eye back on Mary, one can view the construction of the book in its entire around Part Three; it is why the conceit is nature and literature. Upstream would have made a very fine collection if it were solely about nature, just as one can eat bread without a companion; likewise, Mary’s intellect, wit, and spirit of play in her literary criticisms would stand very well on its own, as one can enjoy cheese without any vehicle. Putting the two together is fantastic; each whole part amplifies the whole, exquisitely, and entirely filling.

In all of its total, Upstream is a short book and can take only an afternoon to read. It is inspiring, in the way that means that it will put the breath in you. Whether the energy of that breath is to write, to create, to dance — all very well. But more so than that I think that, after you close the final page, you would find yourself taking your hat off of its hook and setting out the door for a very long walk.  

“Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here,” Mary tells me at the beginning of the book from where she is, already waiting at the ending. “The sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.”  

Oliver, Mary. Upstream: Selected Essays. Penguin Books, 2019.