Journals or memoirs (a kind of rolling journal?) are my current favorite form of reading. For instance, I loved learning about the Middle East from William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain
Fig.#31. Easy to think about linking with the larger world.
Then we have today’s memoir-ugliness. James Frey embellished his memoir of addiction and recovery and the woman who lives in Oregon invented her memoir of living on the mean streets of Los Angeles. Memory is always an iffy thing and mostly depends on whose remembering, but why lie? Why not call the work fiction and admit to the sources of inspiration in the acknowledgements, especially if no backup journals exist? Humph, I say.
Fortunately, Roseledge Books has some fine Maine journal/memoir reads. My favorites (in no particular order) include:
James Balano’s The Log of the Skipper’s Wife
Celia Thaxter’s An Island Garden
Elizabeth Coatsworth’s Personal Geography
Jim Sturba’s Frankie’s Place (Midwesterner joins many-generationed “rusticator” on Mt. Desert)
May Sarton’s The House by the Sea: A Journal
Clearly, Maine draws writers. And Roseledge Books hopes readers, too.
Fig.#32. Sea Street shadows as backbone of a novel’s events?
The fun of blurred journal lines is deciding how much of a novel is actually a journal with new names. Consider, for example, Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs
If the webcam is working, I take full credit.
. As she pointed out, seafarers and voyages, e.g. those involved in the China Trade, are so much a part of the worldliness of the Coast. It’s fun to read of saltwater voyages while here. This continues the almost-theme of books being a window on the world that rests within my memories of Louis Auchincloss’ books about the elite of Manhattan. (See CATCHING UP #2.) Bringing the sailing trade closer to home is maybe my favorite book about TH, okay Port Clyde, James Balano’s 
, a book I liked a lot. (See CATCHING UP #2.) I loved knowing a little, then a little more, of how the world works. It’s a life goal.
and Michael Connelly’s 
). But picky, picky me, I should have read only one at a time. In the second book, which fits with the three-year retirement to return times, there is, all of a sudden, a 6-year-old daughter and her mother. Imagined conception, maybe? And the turmoil, both bureaucratic and inner, seems repetitious. I like Harry enough to wait a while before reading Michael Connelly’s 
updated.
(Amazon’s ebook device, mentioned favorably by Paul Krugman in his 
and Linda Greenlaw’s 
. Ms. Greenlaw’s book is about Isle Au Haut (Remember Gordon Bok’s song, “The Hills of Isle Au Haut?”), but Coastal small town life and lobsters is more like Tenants Harbor than different. Mr. Woodward’s book doesn’t mention Tenants Harbor on map, in text or index, but he has a good bibliography and discusses at length Monhegan, which is close via Port Clyde, and where, with Tenants Harbor, Jamie Wyeth lives.
may be helpful. Certainly those of us offering advice about which we knew nothing were not.
(a biography by Bill Lofy)* on my desk at Roseledge Books is quite exciting.
for Mary with whom I earlier loved Lillian Beckwith’s books about her years with the crofters on the Hebrides (e.g. 
is next, a book for Elizabeth’s second-year-in-college gift after James Watson’s 
last year, and finally Suzanne Stremper Shea’s 
, a book about bookstores for the group that comes each summer and asks for a Roseledge Books withdrawal read. (By Chapter 9, Sheridan Hay’s 
became more an English major’s novel than a bookstore read.) I love thinking about the readers that special request shelves suggest are near.