Deciding which book to read next is tricky and very personal. Liked author, known protagonist, intriguing subject or angle, new evidence, significant locale, bleak, hopeful, wordy, sparse, thin or fat, — the possible tipping points are many and varied.
Fig. #37. Perspective matters. A trend-setting look of aging shingles or a pockmarked example of unprimered paint?
Frame of reference, perspective — okay, bias — is rarely mentioned but important, if “cocooning” kicks in. Cocooning, well “viewer cocooning, “Peter Boyer explains in an article about Keith Olberman, (The NYer, 6-23-08) is “the inclination to seek out programming that reinforces one’s firmly held political views.” It’s a way to sort through the all-information, all-day lives that we live, and I am going to infer that he also means “reader cocooning” or choosing to read books with have an agreeable frame of reference. So it is that I chose not to buy Brad Meltzer’s best selling paperback last year when I read Rush Limbaugh’s name in the “Acknowledgements.” (I can’t remember the book’s title.) But I keep a Vince Flynn CIA thriller on the shelves, currently Separation of Powers, even though on a trip to my winter home in Minnesota, George W. told him how much he liked his books. That is a Flynn-minus. But Vince Flynn teaches in Minnesota, and I love Minnesota, so that is a Flynn-plus. The tie-breaker-plus is knowing that a former student of mine was a friend of Vince Flynn’s brother, and he liked the brother. I always trust my former students. I’ve sold Larry Beinhart’s The Librarian (not Larry David, Jerry; sorry) and Anonymous’ Primary Colors, but they seem dated this year, so no reorder.
Reader cocooning is interesting, said the Minnesotan neutrally. How about webcam cocooning?
because, through main character Henry Knox, the book has big ties to Thomaston which is practically next door– or next town — to Tenants Harbor. He liked it better than others who have commented, but maybe that’s because he and his family summer here. Good grief! At this very minute, David McCullough is on public radio talking about 1776! I’ll listen for talk of Henry Knox, a Boston bookseller who married Lucy Flucker (pronounced Flooker, insists Scott, but I‘m not so sure), only child of Mr. and Mrs. Flucker, granddaughter (I think) of Mr. Waldo who, through the Waldo Patent, was granted, from the King of England, most of the land on the St. George River side of the peninsula, including Thomaston and beyond. But I digress.
; and Julia Spencer-Fleming’s 
)
to continue learning about finance through fiction, but the author wrote more about the greed and egos of the investment bankers involved. This I can get from the NYTimes business section, but I’ll bet anyone who works on Wall Street or in the investment banking industry can put a name to every character in the book. I continue to miss Paul Erdman. Time to return to the Middle East with David Ignatius’ 
.
, Rory Stewart’s 
, or Carl Raswan’s 
because each walked the terrain, albeit at different times, in different areas, and for different reasons, but I knew everything each author noted was verifiable. Given their specificity, maybe these works are journals rather than memoirs, and probably I like journals more; but books of this kind are hard to find. All of these examples were shelved under Travel at the bookstore when first I checked.
(actually Dorothea Moulton Balano’s “log” of her time sailing with Captain Fred Balano in the early 1900’s; the Balanos lived in Port Clyde)
(with wonderful paintings by Maurice Pendergast; garden is currently being recreated)
(her first journal after moving to Maine)
. She visited Tenants Harbor and rented a room and a schoolhouse in Martinsville. She knew the area, so how much of the work is her experience or local lore?
, 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.
