BR-R-R-R! Very cold here. As always, coffee and an unexpectedly good newspaper article about sources warm the hands and heart , in this case a NYT article about the fact-uality of social media. Forget truthiness; this is about the iffiness of facts. What is a fact? Do facts need support? Are supported facts any part of the news? And who cites their support sources? Who checks? Who cares? I liked best reading about savvy readers — of which RB Regulars surely comprise a significant subset — saving the day. Do you have to be a librarian to care about this stuff?
Is this part of a rock wall? Does it matter if you love the picture?
But more important than sources at the moment (Can it be?) is a friend’s request for the next read of the assisted living folk which needs to be an uplifting suggestion with no sex, no violence, and no World War II. Fortunately, the perfect book sprang to mind: Kate Braestrup’s Here If You Need Me. Unlikely as it sounds, this is a funny, affecting memoir of Ms. Braestrup’s road from grieving widow with young children to chaplain with Maine’s search-and-rescue workers.
Following a conversation with a friend who has a visiting adult child who has nothing to do and is driving her nuts, RB suggests a “project book” that upon its reading will evoke an activity, for instance Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, a book about walking and seeing anew the pathways long travelled. Okay this might be a stretch, but your fidgety one might enjoy looking again at neighborhood walkways and reading the landscape.
For instance, I see in mine farmstead trees, later platted land with most houses built in the 1920’s, roads cut, then diverters added in the 1960’s, varied elm-replacement trees from the 1970’s, backyard alleys — now concrete and public — with more and sometimes weird traffic, fewer families, more students, etc. The why’s are less obvious but always good conversation starters at the seasons many social events.
I’m about a hundred pages into the Macfarlane book, just leaving the shores of the outer Hebrides from which we will sail the ancient ocean paths which I hope will extend somehow what I learned from Lawrence Millman’s Last Places. This journey across the northern “stepping stones” demonstrates how early travelers linked old world and new and, thereby, gives some — okay, very little — credence to my argument that the Irish got “here” before the Vikings.
Island stepping stones brought fisher-persons from away ever closer.
And some quickie RB suggestions for the book club leader looking for a murder-less mystery: Toby’s Room by Pat Barker “… Elinor tries to piece together the mystery of what happened to her brother….” The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova “[When painter Robert Oliver refuses to talk or cooperate, psychiatrist Andrew] Marvel goes beyond his own legal and ethical boundaries to understand the secret that torments this silent genius….” The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton “…[T]wo women try to uncover their family’s secret past.” People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks “Inspired by a true story this… work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggedah a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain.”
There is still time to have the fun of choosing a just-right book for each friend on your list and then have the follow-up fun of finding out how right your just-right choice was. Books do feed a friendship, no doubt about it.