FOGGY DAYS

Foggy days are the best bookstore days. Sailors can’t safely sail, so after they moor their boats and walk to the cemetery with a stop for coffee, it’s onto Roseledge Books because there is little else. Cottage renters see the fog, settle in, then go to the general store for a local newspaper and — surprise! — walk right by inviting Roseledge Books. What reader can resist?

#5. Lobster boat stays home in the fog.

Foggy day readers browse.

“You’ve got a lot of books about strong women here,” the man said of the nonfiction choices.

“Well, they are more interesting, dear,” the woman said, without missing a beat among the fiction.

And readers — on foggy days, this often includes dads — browse for favorite books to decide if they should look further.

“You have The Great Hedge of India! It’s a GREAT book. I’ve never seen it in a bookstore before,” the dad-looking member of a group of five enthused. And then they all began to browse.

Moxham, Roy. Great Hedge of India: The Search for the Living Barrier That Divided a People

One of my favorite search books, both the digging through records and the tromping through the fields looking through the 2500 mile bramble hedge.

Five people at once really fill up the bookstore, especially when some of them are antsy kids. Roseledge Books figures readers are all of an age (Read: almost no books especially for children.), so if you have kids, look for anything short and pithy.

Kidnapped has been okay, if they wander around Tenants Harbor in a kind of related hide and seek. Suggesting they find the sites pictured on a $2.00 array of local post cards works, too.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Kidnapped.

Another suggestion that worked (Thank you, Wilma.) was to pair Persuasion with The Log of the Skipper’s Wife and ask: is there a generic sea captain’s wife? Jane Austen’s dialogue is so much fun that reading aloud is a possibility. And the voice of Ms. Balano is just fine, too. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Henry IV, Part I were not popular as “group reads.”

Austen, Jane. Persuasion (Penguin Classics).
Balano, James. The Log of the Skipper’s Wife.

Then there is the inexpensive cookbook of chowders, soups, and stews which uses a stop for ingredients at the general store on the way back to the dinghy and a lengthy prep time — surely with few food fights –to wile away the fog. An earlier post mentioned the 5-minute artisan bread book as possible, too.

Standish, Marjorie. Chowders, Soups, and Stews.

#6: Fog moves away from some rocks.

Sometimes Roseledge Books saves foggy day lives.

“I need a book, right now, or I am going to kill the captain,” shouted the woman pounding on the door early one morning on the second foggy day. The captain, her husband, had missed a fog-free window of opportunity during which to leave the harbor. Or so she said.

“Okay,” I said, opening the door. “Fiction or non-fiction?”
“Fiction,” she replied, as she started looking through the A’s.
“Fat or thin?”
“Medium at least and a page-turner,” she said, as she got to the G’s and picked out a Richard Jury mystery by Martha Grimes. “This looks good,” she said paging through, “I haven’t read this one. And we’d better be out of the harbor by the time I’m done.”

Grimes, Martha. Dust. (The latest Richard Jury paperback.)

Good voyage, and if the fog hangs on for another day, Roseledge Books is here for you.