2021 books

This year I "resolved" to read 66 books, one for each year I'd lived. Although I apparently never uttered that resolution aloud here. Maybe I dreamed it? In any case, I ended up finishing exactly 66 books, so wherever that goal came from, it was met. Yay! Here they are, keyed to month (in case you want to go back and look at a "report"). Highlighted titles were my favorites; * denotes picture books. You can to some extent tell fiction from nonfiction by the presence of a subtitle, but not always. 32 by women, 34 by men.

January 

Barbara Moritsch, Wolf Time
Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive
Philip Klay, Missionaries
Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life
George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Reading, Writing, and Life
Natalie Diaz, The Poet X 

February 

Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
Jess Walter, Over Tumbled Graves
William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow
Betsy Gaines Quammen, American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God, and Public Lands in the West
Kathleen Jamie, Surfacing
Daniel Woodrell, Tomato Red 

March 

Michael Connelly, The Last Coyote
Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation
Eula Biss, Having and Being Had
Ben Fountain, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
Timothy Hallinan, The Queen of Patpong 

April 

Madeline Miller, Circe
Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation
Elizabeth Bradfield, Toward Antarctica: An Exploration
Sarah Stewart Taylor, The Mountains Wild
Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
Ross Gay, The Book of Delights
Donna Leon, A Venetian Reckoning 

May 

Lisa See, The Island of Sea Women
Ben Loory, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day
Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage:Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence
Ann Cleeves, Thin Air
Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse*

June 

Keri Hulme, The Bone People
Akiko Busch, Geography of Home
Aminatta Forna, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion
Kobi Yamada, What Do You Do with an Idea*
Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

July 

Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy
Rebecca Hall, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts
Vendela Vida, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
Dave Eggers, Zeitoun 

August

Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology
Michael Connelly, Trunk Music
Atiq Rahimi, Earth and Ashes
Sarah Bakewell, How to Live; or, A Life of Montaigne
Katie Kitamura, Intimacies 

September 

Oliver Jeffers, Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth*
Elly Griffiths, The Stranger Diaries
Dr. Seuss, Happy Birthday to You
Martin Walker, The Dark Vineyard
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, The Lost Spells* 

October

Batya Gur, The Saturday Morning Murder
Xinran, Sky Burial
Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants
Brad Kessler, North
Paddy Donnelly, The Vanishing Lake* 

November 

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey through the Bardos of Living and Dying
Timothy Snyder, Our Malady: Lessons in Libert and Solidarity
Mick Inkpen, Nothing*
Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
Oge Mora, Thank You, Omu!*
Amy Hempel, Tumble Home
Donna Leon, Acqua Alta 

December 

Charles Bowden, Blue Desert
Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word
Mo Willems, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!*
Mark Haddon, The Porpoise
bell hooks, All About Love
Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

Next year's goal: 12! I bet I'll read more than that, but I figure it's time for a relatively undemanding year. Never mind that 12 of the books I read in 2022 have to be over 500 pages long . . . Even when I'm being undemanding, I can be demanding.

Geocaching day out! Quicksilver Almaden

Although the weather report was for showers all afternoon, today was the only day our friend Alastair had free to get out for a day of caching—so off we set at 6:50 to pick him up. Unfortunately, in the dark near his house I managed to not see a... curb? Something that made a very angry sound when our wheel hit it. And then the tire went flat. Great start to the day. We texted Alastair, and David got going with the jack and the spare tire, and Alastair showed up to help, and by 7:30 we were in his Prius and on our way. (Our trusty car stayed at Alastair's nursing its spare.) Relatively minor impediment, in the end. Yay.

Our destination was Almaden Quicksilver County Park in Santa Clara County, a site of historic interest: the first mining area in California, launched in the 1820s, the goal being mercury ("quicksilver"), important during the gold rush because mercury is used in the gold extraction process, but actively mined until 1976. It's named after a mercury mine in Almadén, Spain—the name Almadén itself from the Arabic meaning "the mine."  

Over the course of the day we found 32 caches, did not find 2, and bailed on 2, which we simply couldn't figure out. Three of those we found were from 2004 and 2005, venerable old ammo cans; and one was an FTF (first to find), a bitch of a puzzle cache that David worked hard on solving, though in the end someone else (in a group of solvers) was the lucky one. But we found it first, ha!

Ultimately, the predicted dry morning was wet, and the predicted afternoon of showers proved nice and dry—gray, cool in the 40s, but dry! Perfect weather for an 11-mile hike. Here are some pictures from the day. (Click to see large.)

Our first quest was in a lovely creekbed,
but after slipping and sliding around
for a while, we decided we just weren't
finding what we needed to...

Still, we saw some beauty, so that was good

Even an abandoned wreck of a car door
was beautiful (what it was doing here is
a complete mystery)

Inky caps

We saw a few old mining relics

This was a trestle that they sent the ore out on

San Cristobal Tunnel 1866—sealed up now
but we peered inside and tried to imagine
what-all went on in there

Our trail late in the day

Looking out over Santa Clara

Geocaching does involve bushwhacking...

And climbing...

And creepy decorations...

Alastair hanging out in a tree
being cool

A 2004 50sumtin ammo can cache with
original log and some familiar old geo names

Wow! That's Bright
(the name of the cache, but also true)

David signing Key Chain—our FTF

Wayne Thibaud, painter

“It has never ceased to thrill
and amaze me, the magic
of what happens when
you put one bit of paint
next to another.”

It seems that deaths stack up quickly at the end of the year, or maybe it's just the rush toward that end that makes us sit up and take note. In the past few weeks, the writers Anne Rice, bell hooks, and Joan Didion. Today, Bishop Desmond Tutu. And yesterday, the artist Wayne Thibaud, at age 101. I've always enjoyed Thibaud, his joyful brashness. He may be best known for his 1960s food portraits: cakes and sundaes, the contents of a deli case. But I've always been partial to his landscapes—California landscapes. Here are a few, some of which he was working on just two years ago. Creative—and appreciative of this place, his home—to the end.

Orange Grove, 1966

Yosemite Valley Ridge, 1975

Channel Farms, 1966

Estate, 1969

Winter Ridge, 2010

Hillside, 1963

Hill Street, 1987

Waterland, 1996

Delta Water, 2003

Ripley Ridge, 1977

Ponds and Streams, 2001

Mountain Roads, 2010–13

River Intersection, 2010

Road Through, 1983

Sandy Cliff, 2013/2018–19

Canyon Pass, 2019

Passing Cloud, 2014

His paints in the studio, annotated, 2013

And shortly after I posted this I learned that biologist E. O Wilson had died. That's three amazing individuals within two days, six since the 10th—or several million ordinary souls worldwide within the last three weeks. RIP, every one.

Book Report: The Lathe of Heaven

66. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971) (12/26/21)

A complex, super-imaginative story about agency and morality. Set initially in a grossly overpopulated,  climate-changed Portland, Oregon (in 2002!), it concerns mild-mannered George Orr, who has a unique gift: his dreams reconfigure reality retroactively, such that something he dreams today will change the world six months or two years ago, with those around him none the wiser. He doesn't like it, and tries to stifle his dreams with drugs bought on borrowed "pharm cards." When he's caught, the authorities order him for Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment with a Dr. Haber. Haber, who has been experimenting with a biofeedback/EEG machine called the Augmentor, sees an opportunity.

As the story progresses, Haber suggests seemingly positive attributes of the world they live in that George should dream into being—peace on earth, no more racial strife, an easing of overpopulation. Each time, there are unintended consequences. (Of course. Does humanity never learn?) Each time, too, George is able to remember the former state of reality, though others around him can't—or in the case of one Heather Lalache, a lawyer he hires to try to stop the treatment (and an eventual love interest), can just barely, validating that he is not, in fact, insane, as he sometimes fears.  Ultimately, Haber seeks to wrest control of "effective dreaming" from George, with truly disastrous consequences. (When Le Guin does disaster, she doesn't fool around.) There are aliens (remember peace on earth?) who look like nine-foot-tall green sea turtles. 

It's an imaginative tour de force, but serious as well. She is asking profound questions about right and wrong, acceptance and action. Many of the chapter epigraphs quote the fourth-century B.C. philosopher Chuang Tse/Zhuan Zhou, who wrote one of the foundational texts of Taoism. The novel's title comes from one such quote: "Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed by the lathe of heaven."

I have not read much Le Guin, but whenever I do read her, I'm very impressed with her storytelling abilities and her beautiful writing. This was no exception. 

Here's a passage from fairly early on:

     "I can answer your questions, and I do. . . . But anyway: look. You can't go on changing things, trying to run things."
     "You speak as if that were some kind of general moral imperative." [Haber] looked at Orr with his genial, reflective smile, stroking his beard. "But in fact, isn't that man's very purpose on earth—to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?"
     "No!"
     "What is his purpose, then?"
     "I don't know. Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass."
     There was a slight pause, and when Haber answered his tone was no longer genial, reassuring, or encouraging. It was quite neutral and verged, just detectably, on contempt.
     "You're of a peculiarly passive outlook for a man brought up in the Judeo-Christian-Rationalist West. A sort of natural Buddhist. Have you ever studied the Eastern mysticisms, George?" The last question, with its obvious answer, was an open sneer.
     "No. I don't know anything about them. I do know that it's wrong to force the pattern of things. It won't do. It's been our mistake for a hundred years. Don't you—don't you see what happened yesterday?"
     The opaque, dark eyes met his, straight on.
     "What happened yesterday, George?"

Sinister, a bit? As George concludes his thoughts, just before he's about to go under, he observes, "The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end?"

Alphabet

Yesterday while out strolling from wharf to wharf to wharf, my eye was caught by a pair of letters on a sign—NO—and I thought, Yes, it's time for another alphabet. Here is the result:

Wigs

Last month our family convened here in California for a week: Geoff and Heidi all the way from Norway, and Patty from Seattle. It was so good to get together with them, and also with Geoff's son and his family, Aaron, Ruby, and Felix, up in Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains. 

Patty flew into the Monterey airport, and we went to pick her up. We waited at the gate, but no Patty. Then a text came: "I'm at baggage." We went over there. No Patty. We kept looking around, and then a woman in pink hair sidled our way. A woman in pink hair, a sly gleam in her eye—with Patty's face! Ha ha ha ha ha! She wore a pink wig for her entire trip! Oh, the audacity!

When Patty described her gutsy experiment, she mentioned the show Schitt's Creek and the character Moira Rose (played so delightfully by Catherine O'Hara) and her oh-so-many "girls" (i.e., wigs). That comment got us to watch Schitt's Creek again. Oh! What a wonderful show! (We finished the sixth and last season this evening.) I had forgotten about the central role that Moira's girls, and her ostentatious wardrobe, play. Not in the story so much, but certainly in her self-creation. Something (self-creation, that is) that I have zero understanding of. But I do admire people who do understand and manifest—in a positive, creative way.

So here, for my own viewing pleasure, I'm posting a few videos of certain themes in the show. First up, Cabaret: 

Next, David and Stevie's friendship:

The Crowening:

And here are a couple of cast roundtables that I am putting here for future viewing. And yes: I will most likely be queuing up Schitt's Creek again before too long. Because it's that good.

And here's the cast talking about the final season:

I just love this show. I think it's important: it teaches love, acceptance, and the importance of family and community above all.

And no, sorry, I guess I didn't say much about wigs. Except it's a wig that got me here.

Book Report: All About Love

65. bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000) (12/22/21)

When I learned last week that feminist cultural critic bell hooks had died, I felt it only right that I finally read this book, which I've had on my shelves for years. Finding it proved surprisingly easy, considering the spine had faded such that only "New Visions" was legible. Clearly, it, too, was ready to be read.

Comprising thirteen chapters titled in abstractions—clarity, justice, honesty, commitment, spirituality, values, greed, community, mutuality, romance, loss, healing, and destiny—the book explores the ways in which we both seek love and run from it. Occasionally, we even find it. In this effort, hooks invokes many, many other writers—psychologists, spiritualists, religious folk, philosophers, etc.—such as Jack Kornfeld, Thich Nhat Hanh, Alice Miller, Harriet Lerner, Sharon Salzberg, Thomas Merton, Marianne Williamson, and many more. (She was reportedly a voracious reader.) She also, and perhaps more rewardingly, speaks freely of her own life—her own experiences with difficult or fulfilling relationships, of being a child in a dysfunctional family, of seeking spiritual solace, of thinking about society and our place in it. 

hooks asserts from the start that love is not simply a feeling: it is an action, a way of being in the world, a process that involves active soulful connection, the will to nurture our own and others' spiritual growth. "To truly love," she writes, "we must learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication." These must all be present and in balance. It is not easy to love; it requires work. 

Then too, we must be aware of tendencies that work against love, such as violence, materialism, manipulation by others, fear (of pain, of death, of discomfort). She points up capitalism and patriarchal structures and norms as especially damaging, promoting false dichotomies of what is possible or desirable in our search for wholeness.

Here is a paragraph from "Values: Living by a Love Ethic" that I found telling, given today's climate:

Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In our society we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.

I found much of what she had to say worth pondering, but I also began to find the book a bit tedious by about half-way through—something about the preacherly voice, and the way she'd circle back and around to points already made. I am glad I read it—in a certain way it is affirming of the very possibility of more love in our lives. I'm also glad I can now mark it as complete.

Salmon Creek workday

This morning I met four other wilderness rangers at 6:30 (though it felt like the middle of the night), whereupon we drove 75 miles down the coast to Salmon Creek Trail—to do some work.

The day really got going while watching the full moon set over the Pacific, laying its beam of light on the water. We were pretty much alone on Highway 1, and the world felt large and beautiful as we snaked down that twisting road in the growing dawn.

At Salmon Creek Station we met up with two other rangers. And then we seven set off, with two crosscut saws, various long-handled tools (shovel, hoe, combi-tool), hardhats, and a general plan: a number of logs across the trail to be dealt with, some tread to be repaired, and always brushing.

I took some photos, of course. (Click to see large.)

Narcissus at Salmon Creek Station

Lynn crossing Spruce Creek,
running nicely after the recent rains

This was our first tree to cut

The next few photos show some of the life
inhabiting said tree

And the ladybugs! Not on that tree, but on some
deadfall nearby—and then, all over the trail...
we tried to move them, but I fear many hundreds
will not survive. And they probably thought they'd
picked the perfect spot to congregate...

Another tree, with a little saw action

The ferns are so green right now!

Treadwork

Spruce Creek on our crossing back out

On the way back north, we watched the sun set on our left (Lynn was sure she saw the green flash—the horizon was so crisp) and the moon rise on our right. 

After a quick Boboli pizza dinner, David and I headed to the Sandbox, a new creative space in Sand City, to watch/listen to an open rehearsal of a string quintet—Dvořák's op. 18/77. Sawing of a different kind. All in all, a delightful day.