The Whistling Season - Ivan Doig

I have a new favorite writer. My sister used to tell me how great Ivan Doig's books were, and she was right, at least based on my first Doig, The Whistling Season. Set in Montana in 1909-1910, The Whistling Season is the story of the Milliron family, with 13-year-old Paul as the moral compass and main character, and the city slickers from Chicago, Rose and her brother Morrie, who go West for a fresh start in life and end up rekindling life and hope for the Millirons.

Here is the GoodReads blurb that does a good job of capturing the essentials of the story:

"Can't cook but doesn't bite." So begins the newspaper ad offering the services of an "A-1 housekeeper, sound morals, exceptional disposition" that draws the hungry attention of widower Oliver Milliron in the fall of 1909. And so begins the unforgettable season that deposits the noncooking, nonbiting, ever-whistling Rose Llewellyn and her fond-of-knowledge brother, Morris Morgan, in Marias Coulee along with a stampede of homesteaders drawn by the promise of the Big Ditch-a gargantuan irrigation project intended to make the Montana prairie bloom. When the schoolmarm runs off with an itinerant preacher, Morris is pressed into service, setting the stage for the "several kinds of education"-none of them of the textbook variety-Morris and Rose will bring to Oliver, his three sons, and the rambunctious students in the region's one-room schoolhouse. A paean to a vanished way of life and the eccentric individuals and idiosyncratic institutions that made it fertile, The Whistling Season is Ivan Doig at his evocative best.

What the blurb doesn't convey is the joie de vivre of the Milliron family, even as they are mourning the death of their mother, Paul and his two brothers are exuberant, each in his own way and following his passions and dealing with his own foibles. It doesn't convey the sense of community that the children of the homesteaders bring to their one-room schoolhouse--the backwards horse race is one of the best scenes I've ever read. And it doesn't convey the excellent writing, characterized by a deft turn of phrase that usually made me smile and sometimes even sigh.

Doig wrote only one stand-alone novel--the rest are grouped into series: Ivan Doig - Book Series In Order. The Whistling Series is the first in a trilogy, and I am eager to read the other two as I believe they contain the further adventures of Morrie Morgan, the greatest teacher on the planet, then or now. I absolutely loved the character of Morrie, and I particularly enjoyed how he taught his students about life, the universe, and everything using Halley's comet (which blazed back on the scene in 1910) as his teaching aid.

Other things I loved in this book--the spelling bees, Toby's broken toe, Eddie's glasses, Paul's dreams and the midnight cocoa conversations between Paul and Rose, and, of course, the mystery surrounding Rose and Morrie's background. 

BTW, Rose whistles while she works, hence the title. 

I love westerns, and I really love finding first-rate western writers. Bringing out my crystal ball, I think I'll be working my way through the Doig collection over the next year or so. He's a gem.

The Lincoln Highway - Amor Towles

I enjoyed Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow so much that I plunged right into The Lincoln Highway and loved it even more!

A bit of background--the Lincoln Highway is a coast-to-coast highway, running from NYC's Times Square to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. I fully expected this to be the chronicle of a cross-county road trip with much of the action taking place west of the Mississippi. That's what the main character, 18-year-old Emmett Watson, thinks when he and 9-year-old brother, Billy, decide to drive to San Francisco from Nebraska to search for their mother after he is released from a juvenile work farm when his father dies, leaving Billy without a guardian.

The story actually is an odyssey but mostly eastward, first to Chicago and then NYC and then upstate New York. After Duchess and Wooly, two fellow inmates (for lack of a better term) from the work farm, break out and latch onto the brothers, the four make their way east together and separately, settling scores and paying debts along the way as they navigate who they are and who they want to be.

The novel takes place in the late spring of 1954, seventy years ago, so the world of Emmett, Billy, Duchess, and Wooly is both familiar and foreign. Emmett is essentially the straight man--earnest but hot-tempered, protective of Billy but often unable to effectively protect him. Billy is a joy--intelligent, passionate, innocent, loyal. Duchess is the con man but with a hard luck story that will break your heart. Wooly is a lost soul, much like Billy but without the wits to make it in the stuffy, upper-crust world into which he was born.

With the boys, we hop freight cars, eat at Howard Johnsons, fight off hooligans, and visit a hobo village, a burlesque circus, the Empire State Building, and mansions of the super rich. 

I'm not sure if Towles was more inspired by Twain's Huckleberry Finn or Homer's Odyssey, but both are there in the adventures and misadventures, in the physical and emotional journeys, in the pathos, and in the secondary characters and iconic settings. Just as Huck and Jim raft down the Mississippi to escape bondage and live free and Odysseus struggles to make his way back to Ithaca and normality after the Trojan War, our boys are both breaking away and trying to set right their upside-down-inside-out worlds.

Speaking of secondary characters, I absolutely loved meeting Dr. Abacus Abernathy, author of Billy's favorite book, which he has read over twenty times, and which serves as his personal guidebook to life. Ulysses (yes, there really is a character named Ulysses) was also a favorite of mine, as was Sally, the girl next door who somehow manages to tag along without really tagging along.

Definitely a 5-star novel. It probably comes closest to being the Great American Novel of anything I have reach in the past couple of decades.

Another Roundup

Wow, it's been almost two weeks since my last post. Time flies when you are planting seeds, watering seedlings, trimming overgrown dogwoods, moving pea gravel, and dreaming of snowless days! Springtime in Colorado means weekly snowstorms...thankful for the moisture, though!

Here are the milk jugs in which I sowed native seeds for the garden.

And here you can see that the Anise Hyssop seeds, which I sowed on Feb 7, have germinated.

When I am not gardening, here's what I've been reading:

The Call of the Wrens, by Jenni Walsh - another dual timeframe with two main characters whose stories converge. Marion is a dispatch motorcycle rider with the Wrens (i.e., Women's Royal Navy Services) during WWI and Evelyn has the same role during WWII. I love the time period and the individual stories were good--what I had a bit of a problem with was how they converged. A solid three stars, but it left me with a bit of eye-rolling despite really enjoying learning about motorcycle dispatch riding.

The Day That Never Comes, by Caimh McDonnell - second in the 7-part Dublin trilogy (yes, you read that right, 7 books in this trilogy), which just shows the charm and cheek of this Irish comic turned mystery writer. This was an excellent followup to book 1, The Man With One of Those Faces. Believe me when I say that these books are enormously fun to read.

The Door in the Wall, by Marguerite de Angeli - I read this after Kathy posted about it on Reading Matters. Published in 1949, it is a children's book that chronicles the adventures of young Robin, son of a knight in 13th century England. We hear about the plague, which cripples Robin, and how he learns to function again and enjoy life (i.e., finding a door in the wall), about life in both a monastery and a castle, and what it was like to travel in the medieval world. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Jane Austen, by Margaret Kennedy - I've been reading Austen and reading about Austen for over 50 years but only heard about this marvelous little book earlier this year. It was pitched to me as a bio, but the biographical details are brief, and most of the book is commentary by Kennedy, a novelist and playwright from the early 20th century. I haven't read anything else by her, but I think her observations and critique of Austen's work are spot on...except for Lady Susan, which I liked far more than she did. This book wasn't easy to find, but I got a copy through interlibrary loan from a university library. 

Oh, and Happy Equinox! Something we can all celebrate!

Barnaby Rudge - Dickens' Least Read Novel

Barnaby Rudge and his pet raven, Grip

I finally got around to reading Barnaby Rudge in February and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it. Of course, I do like historical novels, and this is one of only two historical novels by Dickens, the other being A Tale of Two Cities. 

The full title is Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty, and its focus is on the buildup to the Gordon Riots of 1780 and the immediate aftermath. The Gordon Riots were several days of riots sparked by Lord George Gordon's rallying a mob to violence in opposition to the Papists Act of 1778, which was intended to reduce discrimination against Roman Catholics in Britain. In other words, a set of Londoners were rioting because they wanted Catholics to continue being discriminated against. As Dickens portrays it, the rioters were downtrodden people who were manipulated into rioting by being shown a set of people they could despise even though rioting wouldn't actually help them to a better life.

Most of the characters in the book live in the village of Chigwell, which is now a suburb of London. 

• There is the proprietor of the local pub, the Maypole Inn, and his son, John and Joe Willet, respectively, and his stable boy, Hugh;
•  The rich man and his niece, Mr Haredale and Emma, who also happen to be Catholic; 
• The stalwart locksmith, Gabriel Varden, his wife, daughter (the lovely Dolly Varden), apprentice Simon Tappertit, who I believe is a model for Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, and lady's maid Miggs, whose main role is comic relief. It almost felt like she must have been based on a lady's maid in Dickens' own household who frustrated him to no end.
• Edward Chester is Emma Haredale's beau, and he has a conniving, smarmy father John who makes your skin crawl.
• Finally, there is Barnaby and his mother. Barnaby is a simple young man--none too bright but warm-hearted. His is the role of the Shakespearean fool, and for most of the novel I was wondering why Dickens gave his name to the novel because he is mostly a minor character until the end.

The plot is long and convoluted, after all it was serialized, and Dickens had weekly installments to fill per his contract. There are intrigues, kidnappings, jailings and jailbreaks, highway robbery, betrayals, duels, fires, murder, and a couple of love stories. Despite all these distractions, its heart is a story about propaganda, paranoia, zenophobia, mob rule and mob violence, and misplaced patriotism.

Dickens was a Londoner, and I believe he wanted to really explore how his London grew out of the London in which these riots occurred seventy years earlier. When you think about it, the 1950's were seventy years ago--I'm currently reading The Lincoln Highway, which takes place in 1954, so Amor Towles is today doing what Dickens did in the early 1840s, looking at today's world through a 70-year-old lens. But I digress--Dickens writes of London with a familiarity, an intimacy, that comes from having repeatedly tramped it streets and alleys, byways and highways. It is navel-gazing at its finest--what is this London and how did we come to this?

The 1840s were a decade marked by revolutions throughout Europe, and Barnaby Rudge was published from February through November of 1841, which to me indicates that former court reporter Dickens definitely still had his finger on the pulse of his countrymen and knew what civic perils lay ahead.

So why is this novel so infrequently read? I think the title has a lot to do with it--I found the word Rudge very off-putting--sounded like dullsville to me! And Barnaby really is not much of a character for three-fourths of the book. Calling it The Maypole Inn would have been a far better title, in my opinion. 

Fun fact: in the novel, Barnaby has a pet raven named Grip, who talks like a parrot and is the perfect pet and companion for Barnaby. Dickens modeled Grip after two ravens he kept as pets (sequentially). According to legend, Edgar Allan Poe was so taken with the idea of a talking raven after having read Barnaby that he was inspired to write The Raven.

Now all I have left to read is The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and I will have read all the Dickens novels at least once..and that is a very good reading goal!

Top Ten Tuesday - Books With Nature in the Title

It has been so long since I actually did a Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by ThatArtsyReader Girl) but this seemed like such a natural for me, especially since these days I seem to be embracing nature like never before.

Anyway, here are some of my favorites:

1. The Nightingale - Kristin Hannah - loved this book so much!
2. The Invention of Wings - Sue Monk Kidd - another incredibly wonderful novel
3. Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver - so many of Kingsolver's title fit the bill, but this was a favorite that I need to reread
4. Tom Lake - Ann Patchett - this was an easy one :)
5. The Whalebone Theatre - Joanna Quinn - a sleeper but I loved it
6. A River Runs Through It - Norman Maclean - one of my all-time favorite novellas, I cannot believe I've never written about it.
7. The Big Sea - Langston Hughes - autobiography by Hughes and so good
8. Birds, Beasts, and Relatives - Gerald Durrell - I just love the Durrell family and especially Gerald.
9. Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens - another easy, peasy pick!
10. The Rose Code - Kate Quinn - another all-time favorite

Thanks to Deb (aka Curly Geek) at The Book Stop for inspiring me to join in this week.

Wrapping Up Winter...Please

I've been busy in January and February.

I'm doing a Master Gardener short course through CSU (Colorado State University) extension and have completed the modules on Soils and Amendments, Science of Tree Planting, Tree Care, and Colorado Gardening. I just started Entomology and then after that will do Irrigation and then get my certificate. I have had a garden all my life, but until I retired it was on autopilot for much of the time--I planted, I weeded, I watered, I harvested, but I didn't have time to really dig in, so to speak.

My first big project is to convert an area that used to house our kids' play structure and is now a pea-gravel wasteland into a native (CO native) flower garden. I've been winter sowing Goldenrod, Bee Balm, False Indigo, Anise Hyssop, Rocky Mt Blue Penstemon, Butterfly Weed, Black-Eyed Susan and Little Bluestem Grass seeds. If you're interested in what winter sowing is all about: Starting Seeds in Winter (psu.edu)

Here are the flowers I chose for my native garden from my spreadsheet.

 

And this is the area that I will be planting.

I also plan to have my usual veggie garden and add natives to my perennial beds. I have some hard work and exciting times ahead!

In addition to the course and some gardening books, magazines, and videos, I have been doing other reading as well. 

Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips - set in the aftermath of the Civil War in West Virginia, this was an outstanding novel and actually a perfect follow up to Demon Copperhead, which takes place in the same region but 150 years later. Still the roots of the issues in Demon are clearly visible in Night Watch. There are definitely some parts of Night Watch that are difficult to read and the villain, Papa, is truly horrible, but I found the history to be fascinating--much of the story takes place in a lunatic asylum, and the author includes notes from the Quaker doctor (a real person) who founded the asylum, which really added to the overall story. At first, I was hesitant to read about an insane asylum because I thought it would be very disturbing, but this story showed how the approach of this institution, at least, helped people actually recover from the PTSD they developed during the war years and afterwards. Despite the subject matter, I found it satisfying and uplifting.

Here is a wonderful interview with Phillips, and this quote is a good summation of the novel: “Night Watch is about the post-apocalyptic world of the Civil War years, the tribal divisions, the search for scarce resources, a specific family fallen apart and struggling to survive.” She goes on to describe how this post-apocalyptic world is not unlike our modern world and the issues so many face.

Better Living Through Birding, by Christian Cooper - yep, this is the book by the African American Central Park birder whose request that a woman leash her dogset her off on a tirade that cost her her job and so much more. While the CP incident is what brought this birder notoriety, I really enjoyed reading about his life beyond the incident--how this nerdy kid found his niche in the world and applied the skills he learned as a birder to life in general--be respectful, be observant, be interested, listen, and learn.

The Alice Network, by Kate Quinn - I absolutely loved Quinn's The Rose Code, and I absolutely loved this earlier novel as well. Set in 1947 and 1915, this is the story of the intersecting threads of an American socialite trying to find out the truth about her French cousin's disappearance during WWII and an English woman who was a spy during WWI. I loved traveling around France with Charlie (the socialite), Eve (the ex-spy), and her hunky driver who has his own post-war demons to contend with. Not quite as good as The Rose Code but still a darn good yarn.

Have a great end-of-winter (or summer if you're down under) and happy reading, writing, working, and playing!

Learning Company Great Courses

I am a long-time fan of the Great Courses and have listened to many courses over the past 20+ years. I first discovered them in my local library when I was commuting 40 miles to work and couldn't find an audio book on the shelves that I hadn't listened to already. Those were the days of CDs, and I have many fond memories of mostly history and literature courses that I listened to.

Most recently, I listened to a marvelous course on How to Listen to and Understand Opera, taught by the funny, enthusiastic, and insightful Robert Greenberg, music historian and so much more. Thirty lectures and 24 hours later, I feel like I have just skimmed the surface but also know that I have a richer understanding and appreciation for opera. I grew up listening to it as both parents were fans, but I never had the context for understanding the development of this art form. My favorite section was, of course, Mozart and the in-depth discussion of The Marriage of Figaro, followed closely by Rossini and The Barber of Seville. 

If you want a taste of Greenberg's style, this YouTube short video provides the first part of the introductory lecture.

My current course is Gary Gallagher's The American Civil War--we're talking 48 lectures and 19 hours, but Gallagher is a leading expert on the Civil War and is a first-class instructor.

I am taking a bit of a break from audio novels while I wait for the current ones I have on hold at the library to become available, so this is a wonderful way to dive into topics that are particularly interesting to me.

Final note - many Great Courses (including the two I just plugged) are free to active Audible listeners, which is just incredible, imo.

Any other fans of the Great Courses out there? Any courses you can recommend?

Bruno's Cookbook: Recipes and Traditions from a French Country Kitchen

As I have shared in more than one post, I am a big fan of Martin Walker's crime series featuring Bruno Courrèges, policeman of fictional St. Denis, a small village in the Dordorgne in France. More than a policeman, Bruno is completely comfortable in the kitchen, and every book features several occasions in which Bruno prepares wonderful meals for his friends and colleagues. The mysteries themselves are usually pretty interesting, but honestly, it's the food and the cooking, gardening, harvesting, canning, and foraging that are the real reasons I love these books.

For Xmas, my husband gave me a copy of Bruno's Cookbook: Recipes and Traditions from a French Country Kitchen, written by Martin Walker and Julia Watson. I am slowly reading the cookbook, not only for the recipes but for the anecdotes, excerpts from the books, and insights into life in the French countryside.

The book is organized differently from most cookbooks--each section focuses on the source of the type of food featured, so the first section is on the vegetable plot and market, so there are recipes for haricots verts (green beans), Sarlat-style fried potatoes, leek/potato/sorrel soup, and a red onion tarte tatin, which I am dying to make, among lots of other tasty veggie dishes. 

There are also sections for the fisherman (Walker and his fictional Bruno live along a river and just a couple of hours from the Atlantic), the hunter (featuring duck, goose, pigeon, boar, etc.), the butcher, the cheesemaker and dairy man, the baker, the forager (truffles, anyone?), and the all-important winemaker, which has wines, liqueurs, as well as entrees and desserts cooked in wine.

It's a very snowy day in Colorado today, and I am thinking that I need to jump ahead and read about Pot Roast Chicken Henri IV-Style. That just might be what's for dinner tonight.

Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver

My last book of 2023, and it was another solid gold 5-star read.

So what did I love about it? I loved how Barbara Kingsolver was both true to her source material, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, and true to herself as a writer with Southern roots and something to say.

Since David Copperfield is one of my favorite Dickens's novels, it was fun to see how she adapted the characters and plot points to fit modern-day rural Virginia. It's a little weird to say the book was fun to read because there is so much tragedy and heartbreak in both stories, but Demon is such a fabulous first-person narrator who has a strong voice, deep survivor instincts, and a big heart that in the end the book was satisfying and left me with a bit broader perspective.

I started this post weeks ago but then felt bogged down because I didn't know what I really wanted to say other than Demon Copperhead is Kingsolver's tour de force. 

Oh yeah, I just remembered something I did want to share--because I know David Copperfield so well, I did stop reading Demon for about a week in the middle because I knew the arc of Emmy (Little Em'ly from David) and didn't want to read this sad part right before Christmas. I ended up finishing it just after Christmas, and this part wasn't as horrific as I anticipated (still rough, but it could've been a lot worse).

One more thing--if you ever have any doubts about how opoid addiction became a major destructive force in our society, read Demon. Even if you don't have doubts, Demon Copperhead is a fabulous book that pays tribute to a fabulous book and shows how great literature gives us stories that transcend time and place.

First Roundup of 2024

A beautiful visitor to our neighborhood on a December afternoon.

Happy New Year! I did a fair amount of reading in November and December, so here's a roundup of how I closed out my reading year. One notable exception is Demon Copperfield, which I finished on December 31. Demon deserves his own post, so I didn't include him here.

Nature's Best Hope, by Douglas W. Tallamy - another life-changing book. The basic idea is that everyone, from apartment dwellers in big cities to suburban neighborhood  types, can take positive, small steps that can have a big impact in terms of recreating the local ecosystems that have been paved over, plowed under, or simply overrun by non-native plants that do not provide the right food for the insects and microorganisms at the bottom of the food chain, which affects everything else (including us) in the food chain. While many of Tallamy's followers insist on everyone ripping out their lawn and rewilding their yards, Tallamy would be happy if you just learned about a couple of keystone plants (i.e., those that feed/house a wide variety of insects and birds) like goldenrod and planted them. Baby steps lead to life changes!

If you are interested in learning what plants are native to your area, you can enter your zip code here: Native Plants | Audubon

The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman - really enjoyed this, especially the setting (a retirement village in England) and the 70-something characters who keep sharp by solving cold (and not so cold) cases. This is a series, so I am looking forward to getting to know all of the characters better, especially Elizabeth, who seems to have had a very Cold War career if I am reading rightly between the lines.

Murder at an Irish Christmas, by Carlene O'Connor - I wanted to do some holiday reading this year, and this popped up. It was a decent 3-star read--it is part of a series, which could be fun. Loved the Irish setting and a good set of characters, although I confess there were a lot of them and most with unpronounceable names, which sadly made it hard for me to remember who was who.

The Shortest Day, by Colm Tóibín - a super short story that takes place in New Grange outside of Dublin. New Grange is a prehistoric site, and the story links the ghosts of the past with an archeology professor. It was okay--Tóibín's work never seems to live up to the hype surrounding him as an author. I didn't come away with a deeper insight in the connections between past and present. I think I would have liked it better without the ghosts actually.  The part about the professor and how he relates to the site was more interesting than the dynamics of the ghost society. I just am not into fantasy, I guess.  

A Christmas Secret, by Anne Perry - another 3-star holiday read, this time set in a Victorian (or maybe Edwardian) English village. Fun to read but fairly light in terms of mystery and characterization. It also felt very contrived as opposed to an organic story, if that makes sense. I believe that the Vicar and his wife who are the main characters were minor characters in other Perry mysteries.

The Road to Dalton, by Shannon Bowring - set in the 1990's Maine small town where the inhabitants struggle with poverty, boredom, prying eyes, and judging hearts but manage to find sparks of hope and moments of joy and love and purpose that keep them moving forward. This is Bowring's debut novel, and I am looking forward to seeing what she does next, especially if she continues to set her stories in Maine.

The Late Show, by Michael Connelly - the first in the Renee Ballard series. Very promising beginning to the series, with a good main character with lots of quirks that make for interesting reading--I like the fact that she is from Hawaii, paddleboards for exercise, works the night shift, and has a dog and a grandmother. I swear, I am learning my way around LA just from reading Connelly's mysteries! 

Here is an interesting LA Times article about the woman that Connelly based Renee on: There’s a real-life Michael Connelly character in the LAPD, and she’s gunning for Harry Bosch’s job - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)