Around 30 years ago I met Jim Harrison and had supper with Jim and his publisher, a great Lemuria pal, Sam Lawrence. It was a small gathering of Jim’s followers, mostly booksellers. That evening was an exciting night for me and the beginning of my friendship with Jim and Sam.

Becoming a fan of Jim’s work was already well established, but from that night the joy of feeling like one of Jim’s tribe grew. Today, since first reading Jim’s work 35 years ago, I consider the meaning of Jim’s words to have had a profound influence on me.

Again, as my last two blogs, I am still celebrating  poetry month. I’m writing about Jim’s new book of poems, published in the Fall of 2011, Songs of Unreason. I read Songs, two pages a day, sometimes rereading. However when I finished, I started Songs over and reread the same way. I spend about six months enjoying these poems. My reading time was so marvelous that I could have read a third or fourth time.

Here are a few passages from these songs that I hope radiate the power of Jim’s voice.

from “Notation”

Nearly everything we are taught is false

except how to read. All these poems that drift

upward in our free-floating minds hang there

like stationary birds with a few astonishing

girls and women. (5)

from “Skull”

The only answer I’ve found is the moving

water whose music is without a single lyric. (25)

from “River III”

You have to hold your old

heart lightly as the female river holds

the clouds and trees, its fish

and the moon, so lightly but firmly

enough so that nothing gets away. (71)

from “Suite of Unreason”

What vices we can hold in our Big Heads

and Big Minds, our Humor and Humility.

We don’t march toward death, it marches toward us

as a summer thunderstorm came slowly across

the lake long ago. See the lightning of mortality dance,

the black clouds whirling as if a million crows. (130)

from “Moping”

. . . Memories follow us

like earaches in childhood . . . (131)

from “Death Again”

 . . . Of course it’s a little hard

to accept your last kiss, your last drink,

your last meal . . .

We’ll know as children again all that we are

destined to know, that the water is cold

and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far. (141)

I want to thank Jim for his friendship to Lemuria and me and for all the gifts his words have given to all the Lemurians that are part of his tribe.

“The Blue Shawl”

The other day at the green dumpsters,

an old woman in a blue shawl

told me that she loved my work. (65)

My last blog was a debut author and this one is too and if you need a good beach book here it is.  Chris Pavone has written spy novel with a slight twist.  The Expats is the story of Kate Moore, a working mother who struggles with keeping the balance between raising a family, a marriage and her secret.  Kate’s secret is that she works for the CIA.  She was recruited in college and never thought she would have a family until she met Dexter and fell in love but so far she has been able to keep everything straight and separate.

Dexter comes home one day and announces he has been offered a job with a bank in Luxembourg.  It is a dream job for him and Kate decides that she will leave the CIA and reinvent herself as a ‘stay at home mom’.  They move to Luxembourg and become expats but Kate is continually concerned that her past life will follow her.   After awhile, she begins to relax and make new friends and settle into life in a country where she doesn’t speak the language but her family is happy even if Dexter is constantly working.  Kate and Dexter make friends with another couple from the U.S. and the more time they spend with each other Kate begins to notice that things just are not right.  Her “spy sense” just won’t turn off and she wonders if they are who they say they are.  She begins to dig around a little and soon finds out that Dexter has some secrets of his own.

This is a super fun read and the descriptions of the European cities and wonderful.  I will definitely be looking the Chris Pavone’s next book.

It’s been a good year for baseball fiction so far; here are three options for your consideration. A couple rookies, and a grizzled veteran, if you will.

The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach — Okay, so this is cheating a bit since this came out last year. I mentioned it previously among my favorite books of 2011. I said that I wasn’t sure if it matched the hype. I stand by that comment, but I’d like to clarify it. The Art of Fielding should not be a disappointing book, but the early blurbs and reviews were so glowing that the expectations for a first novel were just too high. It suffers from common first-novel problems: the pacing of the plot varies wildly, characters and themes are introduced and discarded with no apparent reason, and the prose occasionally gets a bit turgid. But there are these moments, and even whole sections, that work so wonderfully that it’s well worth the time and effort. I hope Harbach’s next book arrives with some more aggressive editing, but either way I’m looking forward to it.

The Might Have Been, by Joseph M. Schuster — This debut novel, on the other hand, seems to have been underhyped. It is an astonishingly well-written and balanced effort. Schuster has mined baseball for all its tragedy and triumph while successfully avoiding writing a novel about baseball. Instead, it remains a novel about a man, about his life, about his relationships. There’s an element here that’s reminiscent of one of my favorite novels, The Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone — something related to male psychology, something about how a man sees himself compared to how he wants others to see him, something about the need for respect and success and the pain of failure. Immensely enjoyable.

Calico Joe, by John Grisham — If you haven’t figured it out yet, John Grisham appears here as the “grizzled veteran” of our trio. I say this with no disrespect — on the contrary, at the point in his writing career where contemporaries would be comfortable churning out formulaic serial novels or simply slapping their names on the covers of books they’ve never even read, Grisham continues not only to offer his legal thrillers but to expand his repertoire with books like Calico Joe or his young adult series, Theodore Boone. I like Grisham’s writing best when he’s outside of his legal wheelhouse, so I knew this was one I couldn’t pass up. We have signed copies of Calico Joe, and the signed copies of the third Theodore Boone novel will be here soon.

Dear Listener,

Most people that know me know that I became a little obsessed with The Marriage Plot, writing multiple blogs on the subject, reading it multiple times, and giving it out as a gift more than half a dozen times.  It sang to me on several levels, one of them pertaining directly to my age.  A big portion of the plot for The Marriage Plot outlined the way twenty-somethings must realize that they do not, in fact, understand the world at all.  College seems to have a tendency to bubble, giving the impression that the student does understand the world.  It is that post-college period that is so difficult and life forming.  Naturally there are other books written about the subject, not just The Marriage Plot.  What is odd is there are two books, both published within the past couple of months, both paperback originals, both dealing with this very issue.  I’m one who simply can’t help himself, therefore read both over the course of three days.

Wichita by Thad Ziolkowski looks great on paper.  It follows a young man named Lewis who graduates from Columbia University and moves home with his New-Ager mother in Wichita, Kansas, where she is starting a storm-chasing company and possibly a ponzi scheme. She is possibly in a polyamorous relationship.  She has a man living in her backyard in a tent who may or may not  be making LSD.  Lewis’ brother is also living at Mom’s.  The brother is bi-polar, prone to stripper friends, drugs, and risk taking, among other things.  Lewis’ father’s side of the family is stubbornly intellectual.  Basically the opposite of the house in Wichita.  All of these things sounded interesting to me.  I anticipated it to be a funny, trying, interesting read.  For a while it even seemed that way, but the farther I got into it, the more I realized that Ziolkowski built a landscape for his protagonist to shine, but never formed a protagonist.  Lewis turns out to be dull and heavily predictable.  For a character so engulfed in an interesting setting, Lewis has no personality to speak of.  The book turns right with the character, suddenly becoming bland and uninteresting.  I don’t want to say Wichita was a bad novel, because it wasn’t.  The writing itself is very fine, in most places flowing quite well.  I don’t want to say that I hated or even disliked this book, because I really didn’t.  It was, however, disappointing.  I found myself disappointed. 

The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac by Kris D’Agostino looks, on paper, like a book I would love at sixteen years old.  Calvin just dropped out of film school to move back in with his parents, his high school aged pregnant little sister, and his suit wearing, go getter brother.  His little sister delays telling her parents about her pregnancy, probably because her father is out of work due to his cancer.  Meanwhile, Calvin gets a job as an assistant teacher in a preschool for autistic children.  I wasn’t hoping for much with this book.  I was expecting a funny little romp that would contain very little maturity.  Just like I overestimated Wichita, I found that I truly underestimated Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac.  It was touching.  The characters are very real and very endearing.  I was following most of the story, but the last quarter of the book caught me completely off guard.  I was stunned, saddened, irate, and filled with glee.  I did not expect to feel anything when I opened the book, and I was wrong.

Read both.  Disagree with me.  But accept that sometimes books can surprise you and disappoint you and still make you happy.

I’ve been really digging Maps & Atlases’ newest album Beware and Be Grateful which came out a few weeks ago.  It seems to me that “beware and be grateful” perfectly describes the art of reading.  Below is their first official video from the album.  Enjoy!

by Simon

As Lisa mentioned, memoir has just been moved to the fiction room. Because of that, I’ve found myself moving memoirs up in my current reading stack.  Just published at the end of April, Anna Quindlen’s new memoir Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake was the first one I’ve picked up.

Anna Quindlen is no stranger to the fiction room. She has a list of titles that are both fiction and nonfiction. She started off as a reporter for the New York Post in 1974. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. In 1995 she quit her journalism career to become a full time novelist. I am thankful for her transition into the novel world.

Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake is a book of Anna Quindlen’s observations through life. Her knowledge on life as a woman is broken up into chapters. The variety of topics include: girlfriends, parenting, faith, marriage and solitude.   The chapters are full of observations, thoughts, and a variety of emotions. Some happy, some sad, some nostalgic. They are all emotions that we have felt at one time or another.  Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake is written in a way that makes it easy to pick up as you are able. You don’t have to sit and read the whole thing all the way through but you might just want to.

On parenting, she says “Being a parent is not transactional. we do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it forward endeavor: we are good parents not so they will be loving enough to stay with us but so they will be strong enough to leave us.”

My mother has said something similar to me many times. Of course that doesn’t make things any easier when we are saying goodbye after a good visit. While reading through parts of this book,  I have thought to myself  “my mother should read this.” Sunday is Mother’s Day. I’ve got my gift in hand.  -Quinn