83 of 100: This year's books

As I mentioned the other day, this year I set a record for the smallest number of books read in a year, so this list will be short. Many of the titles are thriller/mysteries (*), because that's as much mental capacity as I've had lately, it seems. I've highlighted my favorites in red, but by far my most favorite book this year was Lonesome Dove.

1/6      Jo Nesbø, The Snowman*
1/11    Stanley Tucci, Taste (aborted)
1/20    Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again
2/4      Susan Orlean, The Library Book
2/17    Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo's Calling*
3/3      Daniel Silve, The Kill Artist*
4/17    Percival Everett, Erasure
5/29    Mick Herron, The Secret Hours*
6/30    Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm*
7/7      S. A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed*
7/16    Oliver Hilmes, Berlin 1936: Fascism, Fear, and Triumph Set against Hilter's Olympic Games
7/24    Liz Moore, The God of the Woods*
8/3      Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
8/19    Loren Long, The Yellow Bus (children)
9/8      David Heilbronner, Death Benefit: A Lawyer Uncovers a Twenty-Year Pattern of Seduction, Arson, and Murder*
10/6    Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
10/27  Arnaldur Indriðason, Jar City*
12/27  Daniel Mason, North Woods
12/29  Claire Keegan, Foster
12/31  Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

Book Report: Foster

19. Claire Keegan, Foster (2010) (12/29/24)

Keegan has been variously recommended to me this year, in particular for this book and another, Small Things Like These, which has recently been made into a movie. She is also the author of a book of "stories of men and women," So Late in the Day, and—surprise! a book I already own (but, needless to say, haven't read yet), Antarctica. Her spare yet richly felt style has been widely praised: Hilary Mantel remarks in the back-of-the-jacket blurbs that "every line seems to be a lesson in the perfect deployment of both style and emotion," while the Irish Times comments that Foster "has beauty, harshness, menace, and the spine of steel worthy of high art."

At 92 loosely set pages, it's a quick read, though I found myself constantly slowing down to savor—a turn of phrase, a particular description, the subtlety with which Keegan suggests strong feeling. The story, told from the perspective of a young, nameless girl, is simple, beginning with her being dropped off by her father with some relatives, the Kinsellas, to spend the summer. But this is Ireland, sometime in the past, and there is an underlying current of disquiet: the girl's family has too many children to support well, the father is a drinker; the Kinsellas have suffered a tragic loss, which is clear to the reader from early on but comes as a world-changing revelation for the girl. Small-town tongues wag indiscriminately. It's a world both beautiful, as evoked through such homely chores as cow tending and rhubarb jam making, and hard. But in this temporary home the girl also discovers a different, more hopeful sort of love than she had ever experienced.

Here is a scene from early on, just after the girl has arrived:

     'Hands up,' she says, and takes my dress off.
     She tests the water and I step in, trusting her, but this water is too hot.
     'Get in,' she says.
     'It's too hot.'
     'You'll get used to it.'
     I put one foot through the steam and feel again the same, hot scald. I keep my foot in the water, and then, when I think I can't stand it any longer, my thinking changes, and I can. This water is deeper and hotter than any I have ever bathed in. Our mother bathes us in what little she can, and sometimes makes us share. After a while, I lie back and through the steam watch the woman as she scrubs my feet. The dirt under my nails she prises out with tweezers. She squeezes shampoo from a plastic bottle, lathers my hair and rinses the lather off. Then she makes me stand and soaps me all over with a cloth. Her hands are like my mother's hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.

There are many other quiet moments of realization like this, other moments of strong feeling. The narrator has clear eyes, and we come to feel we're viewing the world through them too.

It's a lovely book. 

82 of 100: An afternoon walk

Just some photos I took this afternoon on a walk in a bit of the former Fort Ord, an army base active from 1917 to 1994. The highlight of the stroll was hearing great horned owls converse as the light started to fade. I took a video, but I don't believe it will transfer here. The last picture in this array shows two owls sitting together on a power pole. They're just dots, but I know they're there.

The image quality is poor: it's an iPhone. If I shot in RAW and fooled around with the images, they'd be better, but I don't want to fill my phone storage.  I know the iPhone camera has improved (I have a 13; the 16 is supposed to be very decent), but really, I would like to get back to using a real camera. I recently bought a small fixed-lens job that I have yet to start getting to know. So... that's one of my resolutions for the coming year: return to real photography. At least occasionally. Once a month, pack up my gear and head out to see what I see? It sounds possible. And, more important, enjoyable.

There's lots of construction going on hereabouts,
and I always enjoy checking out the heavy machinery.

A fencepost and barbed wire abstraction

A road pavement abstraction

An abstraction from that above piece of heavy machinery

Shrouded pipes waiting for burial

Oaks backed by a water tower

The water tower: beautiful pastels

The home stretch back to the car

See the owls at the bottom of the left-hand pole?

Book Report: North Woods

18. Daniel Mason, North Woods (2023) (12/27/2024)

I have barely been reading lately. Only eighteen books this year, and the last one finished, a schlocky mystery, was back in October! That must be a record. And not one I wish to break, so next year I'd like to get back to reading, make the time, even if that means stealing an hour from my evening TV-bingeing. 

This book did take me a little while, partly, perhaps, because it's a disparate hodgepodge of stories and styles, ranging in time from the Puritan days up to—and beyond—the present day, and encompassing, along with straight narrative, diary entries, a speech, ballads, clinical case notes, a True Crime! magazine article, even home movies. The one thing that stays constant is the place: a homestead in western Massachusetts. It's time alone that keeps things changing, and Mason uses the device with great skill. Even the language evolves as we progress through the centuries, and the plants and trees change, and the original yellow house itself grows in size, eventually crumbles, is reconstructed, finally burns down. It's a story of natural succession. Each part captivated me, and it was fascinating to see how earlier events reappear (often in the form of ghosts). But because it's not strictly plot-driven, it was easy for me to put it aside.

It's impossible to summarize this book. The New York Times has a review that does it more justice than I can, but I will echo its observation that what makes this book succeed so well is the way it toggles between the macro and the micro, in a way making all of it—all this life—at once glorious and trivial, celebrating the sometimes painful exhilaration of being alive while never losing sight of the cosmic indifference that underscores the natural (and human) condition.

Here's a paragraph from early on, sometime in the late 1700s, about a young woman living in what came to be known as the yellow house and a potter she takes a fancy to (though their romance is thwarted by a jealous twin sister):

She was carrying a shopping basket. Despite his crutches, he offered to hold it for her, and when she was done with her purchases, asked her if he might walk her to the edge of town. He’d been a drummer before the accident, and as they walked, he tapped out a string of paradiddles, ruffs, flams, and charge strokes. He spoke of the ways the cannonballs came hissing down the field of battle, the sergeant saved when a British cutlass was embedded in a turnip he had stolen and hidden in his hat, and how he’d seen Howe at Bunker Hill but missed his shot. He’d lost his foot when a gun belonging to a baker from Cambridge went off at half-cock during training exercises. He said that he was lucky, given his profession, that he hadn’t lost a hand. Then he told her about salt glazing. 

And by contrast, here's a paragraph describing a twenty-first-century show of works—forest landscapes—by a nineteenth-century painter (author of the diary mentioned above) who had also lived in the yellow house. The "she" here is Nora, a young botanist:

Eight rooms were mounted to show the works. Her role had been to identify the species when possible, and to provide commentary form an ecologist's perspective, alongside a discussion of Native plant use by two Mohican descendants who'd been brought there from their reservation in Wisconsin. And so she had described the way the level of lichen on the trees gave evidence of snowpack, the exactitude with which Teale had distinguished ferns that lost their leaves in winter and those that didn't, the different holes drilled by the different woodpeckers, the clustered sapling oaks that suggested a forgotten squirrel cache. But what struck her most was the vision of a forest she had previously only imagined. How extraordinary it was to look at a grove of massive beeches unblemished by beech scale, hemlock unmenaced by the adelgid, ash before the borer, elms before Dutch elm disease, chestnuts before the blight. At the end of the exhibit was a virtual-reality installation, produced in cooperation with a team from MIT, in which visitors could don headsets and step into a digital re-creation of Teale's Creek and Chestnuts. When she first placed the glasses on her head, she found herself within a world she'd known only in data tables. She'd seen many photographs of chestnut trees, but she had never stood beneath one and looked up.
     The headsets were so loud that she had to turn the volume down. But this is what it would have sounded like, the wall text told her. Between 1970 and 2019 alone, nearly a third of all birds had disappeared from North America. Once, the forest would have been deafening. In the recording they had layered the songs of hundreds of birds, not only those she knew, but others now displaced to distant forests—blackpoll warblers, Bicknell's thrushes—or lost forever, like the passenger pigeons whose melodies were re-created from musical notations that had been set down before they went extinct.
     And it was then, looking up at the canopy, feeling the birdsong in her spine, that it had all come crashing down.
     She felt as if she had fallen in love with someone only to learn that they were dying....

And to think, in his day job Mason is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford. He's published four other books, which I may have to seek out.

But now, what's next? Let's see if I can finish one last book before 2025 rolls in. (Or, two? For an even 20?)

81 of 100: Instagram six-packs

I haven't been spending much time on Facebook lately. It's become too ad-heavy, too laden with groups "I might like," steered by an algorithm outside my control and druthers—and posts I might actually want to see don't seem to appear in my feed. I'm considering bagging FB, although it does offer a particular way of communicating that IG and Bluesky don't. So... we'll see.

Lately I've been posting a bit more on Instagram. I use IG and FB differently. Today, for example, I posted four shots of our white kitty Luna-ban on FB, a little chronicle (complete with mugshots):

I might post one of those on Instagram (probably the top one), but not all four. For IG, I seek out shots that I find personally meaningful or aesthetically pleasing. And I like a mix of looks or styles: close-up vs. distance, nature vs. built, local vs. somewhere on my travels. I may search back through phone shots, or lift one from years ago on Flickr, to create diversity, eclecticism. 

Here are my latest collections of six that I've featured on FB. They remind me of what a great life I have.

Norway in 2015 and the Cannery Row Dock Ricketts
statue (left); right four: Carmel River State Beach,
including on the far right the annual breaching of
the river (bottom) and the flowing river the next day

Top: grouse eggs, Ravi kitty, and window covering
(first and last from my Coast to Coast trek in May)
Bottom: Cannery Row statue and worker shack,
and construction on neighborhood bike path

Images from my birthday getaway in Murphys, CA,
plus, lower left, the Monterey Christmas tree

Homely imagery, with a Galapagos booby and
an Antarctic penguin thrown in for spice

Top left: a performance of David's recent composition
for string quartet; bottom left: termite wings;
bottom right, Fishermans Wharf Monterey

All the eyes: Lascaux, France; cats keeping a sick David
company; and Madagascar: a tenrec, a Satan's gecko,
a chameleon, and lemurs

I am toying with the idea of another Project 365—a photo a day—and reviving my fairly moribund Flickr stream, though I'd probably also post to IG. But I do seem to be wandering away from FB these days. It's not a bad thing.

80 of 100: Puzzling Adventures

Our friend Lynn found a website, puzzlingadventures.com, that offers, for $50 each, brief walking tours of various cities, guided by questions to be answered. There's one in Monterey, so five of us gathered the other day at the starting point, 100 Foam Street, and set off as team Wilderness Rangers, puzzling away for 34 stops over a few miles. It took us along Cannery Row, where yes, we learned some new things about this touristed area that none of us ever visits—because hey, we're locals. It was fun. It turns out, there is tons of informational signage and plaquage and murals galore about the history of the area, going back to pre-colonial times (though curiously, the tour also included several random segues into the 20-some golf courses in the area, none of which are anywhere near Cannery Row). We learned about Monterey's Filipino heritage, the first canneries, author John Steinbeck and his friend the marine biologist Ed "Doc" Ricketts, and more. I took a few pictures.

Doc Ricketts lives on, in statue form, near the place
where he was killed in 1948. You usually find some
flowers in his hand, placed by an admirer.

A cannery workers shack near the Monterey Bay
Aquarium, saved for posterity. And Lynn, checking
her phone for the next stop on our tour.

John Steinbeck and a few of his colorful characters,
Yuletide-ready. (The guys on the left are playing
Texas Hold'em, just so you know.)

A mural of times past on Monterey Bay.

One plaque includes the first part of this fabulous opening paragraph of Steinbeck's book Cannery Row:

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen" and he would have meant the same thing.

When I say "the first part," I mean it stops at "laboratories and flophouses..." Yes, the plaque includes the ellipsis, suggesting that something good follows. And seriously, the crux of the paragraph is precisely what follows. Who authorized that plaque? They should be fired. 

These puzzle adventures exist elsewhere too—46 states plus DC, as well as Canada, Mexico, Portugal, and the UK. They occur in 27 cities in California: San Diego alone has seven; San Francisco two; LA five. For what they offer, they seem a little pricy to me. There were many typos, and poor instructions on how to enter answers caused us on a few occasions to miss our first guess—which means we came in 48th out of 100 other teams that have made the trip. Of course, clumsy phone fingers also contributed. And did we really care? Nah. And golf courses? On Cannery Row? Really?

But the five of us spent an enjoyable couple of hours on a perfect day, followed by G&T's at Lynn's. What else really matters?

(The concept isn't unlike that of Adventures Labs, an app sponsored by geocaching.com, only Labs tend to be ten stops max—but they're free.)

79 of 100: Two poems—Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou

Nikki Giovanni died today, at age 81. And I encountered the Angelou poem this evening in Shetland, S6E1, a funeral scene. I admire both poets very much. 

Legacies

by Nikki Giovanni (6/7/1943–today)

her grandmother called her from the playground
  “yes, ma’am”
  “i want chu to learn how to make rolls” said the old
woman proudly
but the little girl didn’t want
to learn how because she knew
even if she couldn’t say it that
that would mean when the old one died she would be less
dependent on her spirit so
she said
  “i don’t want to know how to make no rolls”
with her lips poked out
and the old woman wiped her hands on
her apron saying “lord
  these children”
and neither of them ever
said what they meant
and i guess nobody ever does

When Great Trees Fall

by Maya Angelou (1928–2014)

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

78 of 100: Dave Matthews

I was searching YouTube for the most recent Jon Stewart Daily Show segment—and found it, and found it uninteresting (how much flogging does Joe Biden really need for pardoning his son?). But there's that side column of "suggestions," one of which was this, Dave and Tim Reynolds on acoustic guitars playing "Christmas Song," which I love, and which is timely:

Also in that side column was this Tiny Desk Concert, which I had not encountered before, and wow—so cool to listen to Dave perform all on his own (and to hear his speaking voice, so different from his singing voice):

We went to a Dave Matthews Band concert many years ago, and it remains a highlight of my concert-going life. I'm sure I sang along with "Ants Marching" while I danced on the grass, while I sang, while I danced. Such a great concert.

And simply because it's hard to get enough of Carter Beauford and his joy, here's a spotlight on him courtesy of Zildjian:

I'm surprised to learn that the band was featured on Sixty Minutes (of all places) back in 2001:

Here he is breaking down his "most iconic tracks"—really interesting (it starts with "Ant Marching," then "Satellite," "Crash into Me," and then he gets into songs I'm not familiar with, because I never exactly followed him, I just stumbled into him, bought a few albums, went to a concert, and then wandered away):

And finally, there's a documentary about the Dave Matthews Band, which I haven't watched yet, but I'm parking it here for future consumption:

Okay. I've had a sweet little trip down my own memory lane. I don't expect you-all to watch these videos (heck, I don't expect you to have gotten past the first paragraph here), but I'm sure I will again. I really enjoy Dave Matthews.

77 of 100: Persimmons (a poem by Li-Young Lee)

Every year at this time I look for persimmons in our grocery story. In early November, I saw a few hachiya persimmons—the smaller, flatter variety that you eat with a crunch, like an apple. It took a little while for just a few fuyu persimmons to appear—but appear they did, and I bought three, never mind that they cost almost $3 apiece. You don't ignore persimmon season.

And one of the three ripened quickly, so we are now breakfasting on a nice slice of toasted persimmon bread. Such a treat. The other two, well... we'll see what happens with them. I hope they'll ripen up, and I'll be able to make something delectable with them—pudding, cookies, more bread. We'll see. 

Here's a poem by a poet I'm growing to admire more and more.

Persimmons

by Li-Young Lee

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose

persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down.
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten.
Naked: I’ve forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.

Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
Fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat
but watched the other faces.

My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.

Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.

This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents’ cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He’s so happy that I’ve come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.

Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?

This is persimmons, Father.

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.

And to end on another lovely note, also by Li-Young Lee:

One Heart

Look at the birds. Even flying
is born

out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open

at either end of day.
The work of wings

was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.