WHAT IS IT ABOUT MAINE?

Posted on March 21, 2008 by colleen

Maine is not for everyone. Some people visit once, can’t find anything to do, get in a twit when cell phones don’t work, and willingly leave early. Others come, settle in, book the cottage for next year before they leave, and buy lots of withdrawal reads from Roseledge Books on their way away. So how do you know if you are likely to like Maine or to not like Maine?

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#7. Fifty-five steps from the rock wall up the hill on Sea Street to Roseledge Books.

The best test I know is to read Robert McCloskey’s One Morning in Maine. If you finish it and think nothing happened and, even worse, if you can’t figure out why it’s a classic, Maine is probably not for you.

Another good test is to read Sarah Orne Jewett’sThe Country of the Pointed Firs and to think that Dunnet Landing might be a good place to visit. Some think Dunnet Landing is really Tenants Harbor; others think it is Martinsville. One guy was sure it was Port Clyde. I don’t think the pace of village life in coastal Maine has changed much.

If you’ve come to Maine and had the first of a lifetime of best vacations ever, then Roseledge Books has some great withdrawal reads.

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#8. An airy walk-by garden. I like airy.

My favorite “summer people” books are Ruth Moore’s Spoonhandle, a novel about rich people from away buying up local property, and Jim Sturba’s charming Frankie’s Place, A Love Story during which Midwesterner Sturba becomes a Mt. Desert “rusticator” and marries Frances Fitzgerald. Maybe I chose these books because I’m a Midwesterner who fell in love with Maine on a vacation near the rocks of Acadia and Frenchman’s Bay. Now 35 years later, I’m a summer people. But no matter what, both are great reads.

In the old days of twenty years ago or so, a subscription to the weekly newspaper, Maine Times, was a good way to keep memories alive. Today, the closest equivalent is a subscription to the monthly magazine, Down East. But for the book most likely to provoke the most varied and personal memories, I love Paintings of Maine. Find the places of your heart, remember the good times, and plan for next year

McCloskey, Robert. One Morning in Maine

Sturba, Jim. Frankie’s Place

Moore, Ruth. Spoonhandle

Jewett, Sarah Orne. The Country of the Pointed Firs

Paintings of Maine

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FOGGY DAYS

Posted on March 14, 2008 by colleen

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?

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#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.

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#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.

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POSSIBLES

Posted on March 6, 2008 by colleen

Commenter and friend Mary T. likes to read of the sea when near the sea, but that means very different things to different bookstore visitors: seafarers, cottage renters, overnighters, or summer people, like me. The folllowing are some newly published possibles.

LeClair, Jenifer. Rigged For Murder (Windjammer Mysteries). Durban House Press, 2007. Paperback already!

Set in Maine on a windjammer and featuring a Minneapolis Police detective on leave, this mystery with romance got a “dandy” in the St. Paul (MN) Pioneer Press (2/17/2008). With likely ties to Tenants Harbor, as windjammers sail from nearby Rockland harbor and sometimes stop in Tenants Harbor, this is a Roseledge Books MUST, but for whom? Suggestion from Kathy, my best spotter of the remote.

Pope, Frank. Dragon Sea: A True Tale of Treasure, Archeology, and Greed off the Coast of Vietnam. NY:Harcourt, Inc./Harvest, 2007.

Adventure on the high seas, a plus. Vietnam might interest the getting-older sailors, even if –or maybe because — the wrecked ship has a boat load of fifteenth century ceramics. In the NYTimes Book Review’s “Paperback Row” of new and noteworthy. Probably for seafarers, maybe veterans, and for sure, me.

Gibbins, David. Crusader Gold. Bantam Books, 2007.

“Underwater adventure” and “unearthed medieval map” (or their equivalent) were the lure words in the NYTimes Book Review “Paperback Best Sellers: Mass-Market Fiction,” and the book, so far, is a good gamble. I’m only on Chapter 3, but the book starts with a great map that includes the Mediterranean and all the North Atlantic Ocean a story needs to include noted stops in England, Greenland, and, yes, the Viking remains in Labrador. Chapter 1 has a quick historical overview of Istanbul, in Chapter 2, the Vinland Map, a long time, if sometimes peripheral interest, is evoked, and Constantine is linked to the Vikings. If I’m really lucky the Irish monks might show up, too. I love this, and those who liked Clive Cussler’s Treasure might, too.

And not to forget:
O’Hanlon, Redmond. Trawler: A Journey Through the North Atlantic. Vintage, 2006.

Author O’Hanlon’s travels are always amazing. This time he takes to the sea. North Atlantic alert.

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ROSELEDGE BOOKS HAS ONLY PAPERBACKS

Posted on March 1, 2008 by colleen

Roseledge cottage has no insulation. This allows instant air conditioning with temperature shifts and big time humidity, especially when the fog rolls in. Mostly this is good or at least okay. But without insulation, hardcover books would wilt, just as did the cardboard innards of the old Selectric typewriter. So I have only paperbacks. I’ll have to wait, but the following hardcover suggestions are possible.

Hertzberg, Jeff and Zoe Francois. Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007. Hardcover only, so far.

Foggy day activity book? Maybe, especially as Tenants Harbor General Store, formerly Hall’s Market, carries small bags of flour, but no longer carries Borealis or Atlantic Baking bread — at least not during summer ’07. A friend’s friend made and shared the bread in this book, and my friend declared it delicious. I hope the book comes out in paperback. I also hope the boats have ovens. If not, I’ll stick to having books of soups, stews, and chowders.

Manning, Phillip Lars. Dinomummy: The Life, Death, and Discovery of Dakota, A Dinosaur From Hell Creek. Boston: Kingfisher, 2007. Hardcover only, so far.

Any day activity book? Dinosaurs are always a plus, but add rocks and the book zings. The rocks of Marshall Point, a five mile car or bike ride from Roseledge, may not be hiding a dinosaur, but they are good rocks to check out and see what you find. Think tidal pools, contemporary shell heaps (read: clambake residue), old boat nails, shark teeth, or really round stones. Mostly Dinomummy is a possible Roseledge Books addition because it demonstrates once again that North Dakota, my childhood home, glows and because my very great-nephew, Alex, who is 1, pointed to the dinosaurs in the book and exclaimed, “Gah!” (according to his mother). Now THAT’S a rave review. I hope a paperback version is in its future.

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#4. Marshall Point Light House Rocks. A view with perspective. A place to think about things that matter. Do you have to see islands for it to be a Maine view?

An e-mailer suggested:

Braestrup, Kate. Here If You Need Me: A True Story. Little, Brown, 2007.Paperback due July, 2008.

Kate Braestrup has a great voice and worthy perspective. (I’ve only heard her interviewed on Minnesota Public Radio.) And she’s a Mainer. Friend Dana recommended the book as being both inspirational and easy to listen to on the treadmill. She downloaded the ebook from the library. You might think buying it for Roseledge Books is a no-brainer.

But Here If You Need Me is not yet available in paperback, and that’s a problem. Uninsulated Roseledge with FOG [emphasis added] and temperature shifts treats flexible paperback books most kindly, even if the paper curls and turns yellow. The other problem has to do with books about tragedy, and this book assumes tragedy.

When Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm was first available in paperback (2007?), I bought six copies — a lot for Roseledge Books. The book was well received, the author lived nearby, the book was about sea and weather and tragedy that “my” sailors would recognize, and Linda Greenlaw, by then an author in her own right, was in the book. But soon thereafter, I suggested The Perfect Storm to a sailor. He looked at me, aghast, and said, “I’m not reading that while I’m sailing.” Of course not. I had glossed over a pertinent tragedy alert. These several years later, I still have most of the copies.

Junger, Sebastian. The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea. Harper Perennial Reissue, 2007.

Choosing books is tricky business. Kate Braestrup’s book is about life after tragedy, an important difference from Sebastian Junger’s book. A must for Roseledge Books come July. Good suggestion.

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NORTH ATLANTIC BOOKS, CONT’D.

Posted on February 23, 2008 by colleen

Finally, I found the nugget in Jar City. The Icelandic database of genealogy and medical history played a part in the story. Remember the good article about it in The New Yorker some years ago? The question, as I recall, was whether Iceland should license this amazing unbroken record of Viking descendants and their medical histories for genetic research by others or keep it and the privacy of those in it for Iceland’s use. I love this. Whereas others follow the money to solve life’s mysteries, I follow the information, and this database is one huge treasure of applicable information. This has nothing to do with Roseledge Books’ customers.

This database excitement lasted long enough for me to start Indridason’s follow up novel, Silence of the Grave. If possible, it is bleaker than Jar City, but I am learning, through Erlendur’s “activities of daily living” (a nurse term) about Reykjavik. Find a buried skeleton, and the police ask if the bones are Viking bones as a matter of course. They don’t ask about Irish bones, at least not to p. 100.

Also, in this second novel, Inspector Erlendur continues reading about “Icelandic missing person scenario[s]” and applies his reading to his work which thoroughly confuses his colleagues (p. 97). I love knowing why someone chooses to read, then use, a particular book or topic.

Then, on p. 229, a little nugget! (I’m working out nugget categories.) He mentions Minneapolis, my winter home. That I live in both Minneapolis and Maine is not enough of a tie to warrant a sure place on Roseledge Books’ shelves, but it’s fun to find and I love living both places.

Indridason, Arnaldur. Silence of the Grave (Reykjavik Murder Mysteries, No. 2). New York: Picador, 2002.

Posted in Book Nuggets, North Atlantic Books | 1 Comment

ROSELEDGE BOOKS

Posted on February 16, 2008 by colleen

Roseledge Books is a very small, very fine, bookstore, open from Memorial Day through Labor Day on Sea Street in Tenants Harbor. The (roughly) 750 paperback books are on shelves and a table on the front porch of Roseledge cottage.

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#1 Roseledge from across the road, before the new deck, without the ROSELEDGE sign over the door, and before the flowers blossomed. (Or is white snow on the mountain with gray green leaves next to the road?)*

For twenty years, I’ve offered lawn chairs in the front yard as a fringe benefit for book buyers, et al., but last summer I added a discreet front deck. This is exciting because now, while the reader partner browses, the non-reader partner of a bookstore visiting duo can monitor the harbor from an upper, even better vantage point than the erratically hedged, down-sloping front yard. As one deck-sitter told his partner, “Take your time; I’ve got the best seat in the harbor.” Music to this bookseller’s ears.

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#2 Tenants Harbor at high tide with mostly lobster boats in the harbor. This must be in June before the sailboats occupy half of the harbor visible from Roseledge. The closed end of the harbor to the “front line” of boats becomes glorious mudflats as the tide goes out. The garage that used to be across the road, right in front of the cottage was hauled away and put elsewhere by the best neighbors in the world.*

Some first-timers have thought Roseledge Books was hard to find. If you know where to look, you can see the red cottage from the harbor.

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#3 Roseledge is the red cottage up the hill as seen from the harbor. Picture was taken by Charlie in a kayak. Sailors have suggested I get a flashing neon rose, raise a rose flag that says BOOKS, or insert not-green insert roof tiles that spell BOOKS so that readers can see a perfect place from the harbor. I love this shot.*

I have a wooden sign attached to a tree at the foot of Sea Street, three houses away down the hill. The trick is finding the tree once you’ve left your dinghy at the public landing. The sign has an aging, red wood tulip and says ROSELEDGE BOOKS, 2-6 pm, with an arrow. I changed the vinyl letters from black to white when an astute observer noted that the old wood of the sign turned as black as the letters when it was wet and were, therefore, unreadable in the rain when readers most often needed more to read. And I asked the chestnut tree owner if I could trim the branches when, one fertile summer, the new growth severely brushed the letters on the sign. Still, one person commented,

“You need to advertise more.”

I have the sign on the tree.”

“You make it hard for people to find what you want to sell.”

It’s the Maine way, I said.

I used to post a suitable post card on the side of the cooler at Hall’s Market. I even got a coveted eye-height site. But Hall’s Market was sold and procedures, floor plan, and now the name changed. I used to post a different, but equally suitable postcard at the post office, but I was declared a for-profit business and therefore no longer eligible to post my postcard at the post office. I pointed out the difference between being for-profit and making a profit, but to no avail. Okay, I need to post postcards in new places. And I may do so. But mostly Roseledge Books draws return customers and is otherwise a word-of-mouth experience.

*The pictures are from son Charlie, who might or might not pay attention to my useful suggestions but who always takes great pictures.

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SEARCH BOOKS COMING

Posted on February 10, 2008 by colleen

Okay, I’ll admit it. Jar City is slow going. Well written, just unintriguing. Maybe I’ve watched too much Law and Order and I already live among Scandinavians, but this police procedural with its “painful inevitability” addresses crimes, criminals, victims, police, and bureaucrats and, so far, sums to ordinary. This makes it lifelike, I know, which is good, but I want more “new,” and the ratio of new to not new favors not new.

One very good point: Inspector Erlander is a reader. From p.17:
“Eventually, [Inspector Erlendur] picked up the book he was reading, which lay open on a table beside the chair. It was from one of his favourite series, describing ordeals and fatalities in the wilderness.
He continued reading where he’d left off in the story called “Lives Lost on Mosfellsheidi” and he was soon in a relentless blizzard that froze young men to death.”

Good grief. I’m still hoping for new nuggets about the Irish/Viking question, sailors’ interests, and, most recently, sheep/yarn life for a knitter friend who is planning another sheep trip.

Nugget reading requires some attention, so I shouldn’t read Jar City only at bedtime, but I’ve begun a different book for mid-day adventures — and I think it is a big time, very exciting, winner.

Damrosch, David. The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2006.

This is a search book, that is, the search matters more than the finding. I love search books. My favorite is probably Nicholas Clapp’s The Road to Ubar, a search for an ancient city in the empty quarter of the Arabian desert, but this new book continues my efforts to learn about the Near East.

Clapp, Nicholas. The Road to Ubar.

I took a course in Sumerian, the dead language of ancient Iraq, called Sumer, had a great, good time, and learned that history doesn’t change much. Fifty-five hundred years ago, Sumer (Iraq) and Elam (Iran) were fighting over water. Today it’s oil. What are we doing there? But I digress.

To p. 9, the Damrosch book is promising. My only problem, so far, is figuring out how it fits with Roseledge Books, but it’s still early days. The Road to Ubar unexpectedly came up at a summer birthday dinner in Maine. Two of us had read and loved it, and another knew he was missing out. This has to be a classic instance of Tenants Harbor demand, and, ta da, Roseledge Books had its reason for carrying a (mostly) desert adventure.

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A FRIEND CALLED

Posted on February 7, 2008 by colleen

Iceland!? Why books about Iceland?

Because Iceland is part of the North Atlantic, and Tenants Harbor sailors sail the North Atlantic.

You mean the sailors who visit Roseledge Books are on their way to ICELAND?

Well, they might be.

Huh. Pretty thin.

And books about Iceland might have some nugget of information to indicate that the Irish were here before the Vikings because Iceland is a “stepping stone” on the route early sailors took from northern Europe to wherever they were going. Chances of a nugget sighting are remote, I know, but always worth reading a good book to find. The sailors who stop in at Roseledge Books talk sailing and I talk Irish and we have a very good time arguing. Besides, good books sell.

Arghhh. (Which I think means “I almost understand.”) “By the way,” my friend concluded, “I’m reading Silence of the Grave, the later book by Arnaldur Indridason. Let’s talk.”

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TENANTS HARBOR TIES

Posted on February 4, 2008 by colleen

Today is a very good day. I found a tie to Tenants Harbor in the last part of the book, Icelander! (Roseledge Books is part of the village of Tenants Harbor, Maine.) This is very exciting because I am ever alert to ties with degrees of separation between a book and TH.

For example, mysteries by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child set in New York City have forensic work done at the Museum of Natural History, and the first Director of the MNH is Albert Bickmore who lived (or maybe visited relatives) two houses away from Roseledge Books in TH.

In Icelander, on p. 196 I read, “The high wooden walls of [Hrothgar’s Mead Hall] were hung with chalk drawings that depicted the logos of the various available beers. This month’s guest brew was St. George’s Winter Ale, and its logo showed the eponymous saint lounging beneath an apple tree while some sort of dew — presumably Winter Ale — dripped from the fruit and into his yawning mouth. In the background, a white-clad damsel was battling a dragon; she used a hairbrush instead of a sword.” And guess what? Tenants Harbor has an equally unusual St. George and the Dragon, sculpted from discarded metal by former welder, Dan Daniels, and standing very tall on the lawn of the Town Hall! (The village of Tenants Harbor is in the Town of St. George.)

Coincidence, you say? A harsh judgment. Clearly, the book provides, albeit unknowingly, a tie between two places, alike in their harboring unusual St. Georges. Okay, the tie is, well, tenuous, but it’s fun to think about the possibilities as I read the books and live summers in TH. And it usually moves the book’s “buy-rating” up a step, in this case, from “maybe” to “maybe+”. Tie to TH or no, Icelander is one strange book.

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NORTH ATLANTIC BOOKS

Posted on February 2, 2008 by colleen

It’s halfway to summer in Maine and VERY COLD in Minnesota. Errol Flynn’s swashbuckler, Sea Fever, is nowhere on cable and the televised PGA tour site is not near the ocean. So I’m bored with old snow and missing summer and Roseledge Books people. Clearly, this is the perfect time to start figuring out — with your help — what new titles to add to the shelves of Roseledge Books. I’ll tell you about the new books I’ve heard about, seen, or read, and I’d love to hear what you think.

I’m currently reading Icelander by Dustin Long.

Long, Dustin. Icelander. NY:Grove/McSweeney’s, 2006.

Friend, Millie spotted this title. Iceland, as part of the North Atlantic, is popular among the summer sailors who visit Tenants Harbor, so it looks good. And the book is a murder mystery, another plus. But this is one strange book. “A Nabokovian goof on Agatha Christie” the jacket explains. Ties to Iceland are at least remote. It doesn’t keep me up nights, but I am finishing it. I need more on Iceland because I sold both Haldor Laxness’ Iceland’s Bell and Joanna Kavenna’s The Ice Museum, and I usually only have one or two copies of each title.

Laxness, Haldor. Iceland’s Bell. Translated by Philip Roughton. Vintage, October 14, 2003.

Kavenna, Joanna. The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule. Penguin (Non-Classics), January 30, 2007.

The chapter on Iceland in Joanna Kavenna’s The Ice Museum is good, in fact the whole book is good, but I sold my only copy last summer, and often good titles are not available a second summer, unless the author publishes a second book. It’s probably wise to keep looking.

And guess what? Next on my reading stack just happens to be Arnaldur Indridason’s Jar City: A Reykjavik Thriller.

Indridason, Arnaldur. Jar City: A Reykjavik Thriller. Translated by Bernard Scudder. NY:Picador, 2000, 2004.

This title could be good. It’s a murder mystery about an interesting place, both pluses. It introduces Inspector Erlendur, and first novels often have something extra. It was well-reviewed in both The Boston Globe, my summer paper, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. But the reader has to be ready for bleak. Library Journal recommends it especially for fans of Henning Mankell and Karin Fossum, and The Globe review calls it “a dark, haunting novel.” Bleak.

Posted in General Discussion, North Atlantic Books, Roseledge Books | 3 Comments