Daughter of Moloka'i

 Years ago I read Moloka'i by Alan Brennert and I loved it. So when I saw Daughter of Moloka'i on the shelf in the library I snatched it up. This book is a companion to the other book. This book is focused on Ruth who was born to her parents who lived in a quarantined community on the island of Molokai because her parents had Hanson's Disease before there was a cure. All children born to parents on the quarantine facility were taken away at birth and sent to an orphanage. Ruth is adopted by a kind couple of Japanese descent. She becomes the little sister to three older brothers. The family moves to California and work on a strawberry and grape farm. Life for Ruth and her family turns upside down when FDR sends all Japanese to internment camps. Ruth and her family are sent to Manzanar Relocation Camp (which is now a national park). When they are finally released from the camp they return to their farm and everything was taken from them. They settle in a bigger town to the north and start over from scratch. By now the medical field has found out that sulfa drugs can treat Hanson's disease. Ruth gets a letter from her birth mother, Rachel, who wants to reconnect. I loved every minute of this book.  

The Binding

 Bridget Collins wrote The Binding, a novel about book binding. I was drawn to the book by it's beautiful cover. This is an alternate universe historical fiction novel set in the 1850's. Emmet Farmer lives with his parents and little sister on a farm. Emmet has health problems and unable to keep up with his chores so he is sent to a book binder named Seredith to learn the trade of book binding. In this alternate universe books are forbidden to the general public. Binders are still needed because book binders have the ability, if the customer approves, to wipe out a person's memory and put it in a book which is then held in storage. If you want to rid yourself of a traumatic memory you visit a book binder. You sit in a chair and agree to the binding. The book binder lays his hands on your shoulders. Your memory goes into the book binder who writes it all down, binds the book, and puts it in storage. That is how things are supposed to work. Of course there is corruption. Books are stolen from storage and secrets are shared with a person who paid for the book. Wealthy landowners take advantage of a servant girl, send her to a book binder to erase the memory of her assault, and do the same thing again next week. The whole book is about Emmet coming to understand all this. I thought the plot was very creative and the writing was good. 

Oh, William

 Years ago I read Elizabeth Strout's novel My Name Is Lucy Barton. I liked it. Now I just read Strout's latest novel, Oh, William and found out it is a sequel to My Name is Lucy Barton. Now Lucy is in her 60's. Her husband has died and she feels lonely without him. She revisits her relationship with her first husband, William, to whom she was married in the first book. William is the philandering father of her two adult daughters. He is experiencing some unhappy changes in his life so he calls on her to navigate them. Sometimes he is infuriating and I found myself mentally telling Lucy to kick him to the curb but then he calls her "Button" and her heart melts and she forgives him once again. Lucy speaks honestly about her ex-husband's qualities. I thought the author did a great job describing the conflicted feelings a person can have about someone they used to love.

A Sign Of Spring

Today on my walk I found some blue flowers growing on a road side. This is Siberian squill. Although I was glad to see a flower blooming, I was not happy to learn this is an invasive species and should be eradicated.

 

The Queen's Gambit

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevy was published 39 years ago. There is currently a Netflix series based on the book. I listened to a e-version of the book on my phone while also watching the series on Netflix. The book is about an orphaned girl named Beth who grows up to be a chess prodigy. Much of the book is about chess. I have played chess a dozen times but never got into it. I found it easier to absorb the chess moves visually on the Netflix series compared to the chess moves written out. Much of that is above my head. I enjoyed reading Beth's story and all the struggles she powered through during her life. I thought this was a wonderful story.

Flooding

 Tuesday is my day to check my streams for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Today was my fourth visit to my two streams. The Cloquet River was high today. As I drove to my second stream, the Us Kab Wan Ka river, I thought after I checked the water I would go for a hike along the snowmobile trail to get some exercise in. Where I monitor, the river goes through 3 large round concrete tubes. Usually the tubes are half full of water or less. Today I couldn't even see the tubes. Upstream I saw three whirlpools where the water was circling to get into the tubes. The whole area was flooded. Beyond my monitoring place the river was flowing over the road which is something I saw once before a couple of years ago. This water was so fast and so deep I wouldn't dare walk or even drive over so no walk down these snowmobile trails for me today. The water was cold too. As I held my secchi tube upright with one hand and poured water from the bucket with my other hand, cold water spilled over the hand holding the tube. My fingers just ached with cold. My thermometer said the water was 35 degrees. The air temperature was 28 degrees. The water was clear though. I could see the black and white bottom of my tube all the way to the bottom.

Upstream is on the right.

Downstream is on the left.

Bewilderment

Bewilderment usually means confusing or unclear. In the novel by Richard Powers, Bewilderment means going back into nature to heal your tormented soul. Robin Byrne had an aggressive episode in his third grade classroom. This isn't his first melt down. The school recommends he see a psychiatrist so that he can have a diagnosis. His father, Theo, wants to avoid all that so he takes him from their home in Madison, Wisconsin, for a week of camping in the Smokey Mountains where he went on his honeymoon many years ago. Both Theo and Robin are mourning the death of Allyssa, Robin's mother, who died in a car crash two years ago. Robin is a very troubled child and things seem to be getting worse. Theo is barely keeping up at his job at the University of Wisconsin as a professor of astrobiology. To entertain Robin before going to sleep Theo makes up stories about various planets and gives him details whether the imaginary planet could sustain life. Theo turns to a coworker in the psychology department for help. At this colleague's suggestion, Robin is enrolled in a experimental study  on neurofeedback. Robin enters a MRI machine and is given prompts to try and change the image in front of him by thinking. The neurofeedback helps Robin regulate his emotions until the experimental study is suddenly shut down. The novel was very interesting. I got a little lost in the descriptions of other planets but I really enjoyed the scenery of the forests both in Wisconsin and in the Smokey Mountains.

Phenology

Today I went on a phenology hike with others at the Hartley Nature Center. John Latimer led our hike today. He has a weekly phenology show on KAXE in Brainerd and Grand Rapids. A group of 20 of us followed him on the muddy and icy paths through the nature center looking at the trees. We looked at the speckled alder. The alder here are behind the alder in his home in Grand Rapids. The alder has not dropped pollen yet here but it has in Grand Rapids which is 11 days later than any year since he started paying attention. We looked at the pussy willows. He showed us how to distinguish the birch from the aspen. For some reason we got to talking about star nosed moles and how sensitive the star nose is to touch. This mole can sense things 20 times more sensitive than human touch. The star nosed mole is the fastest eating mammal on our planet. Another weird thing is that when a star nosed male is underwater, and they do spend time in wet environments like ditches and streams, they can smell underwater by releasing a bubble of air next to the item in question, take the bubble back in, smell the bubble, and decide whether it is edible. My dog, Ruby, dug a star nosed mole up once in our yard so we got a good look at the creature. I didn't know until today that they could swim. Even though rain fell on us during our two hour hike we didn't mind because we enjoyed learning from each other.

The Little French Bistro

 Nina George is a prolific German author. Most of her books have not been transcribed to English. This story is about a woman named Marianne who lives a lonely life with her husband in Berlin. On a vacation tour in Paris she decides she has had enough and she leaves him. She travels to Brittany and ends up in a tiny village by the shore. She is offered a job at a bistro and a room at a hotel. Marianne meets people who welcome her, teach her how to speak French, and surround her with acceptance. Gradually she comes back to the person she was before her stifling marriage. The Little French Bistro is a lovely story about a woman reclaiming her identity at age 60. The descriptions of the food made my mouth water.

Lucid Dreaming

Eight years ago I met Lee Adams. He worked on the Nimitz, the same ship my son worked on. In fact, I shared a room with his mother onboard. So when I found out he wrote a book, I wanted to read it. A Visionary Guide To Lucid Dreaming; Methods To Working With The Deep Dream State was published last year. Lucid dreaming is when you are in a dream and you know you are in a dream. That has happened to me a few times and it was interesting so I thought I would learn more about it. Besides thinking about wanting to have a lucid dream as you go to sleep, another thing to do is set your alarm for five hours of sleep, waking up, staying awake for 45 minutes and then going back to sleep. Yep, I am not doing that. My favorite thing about retirement is waking up naturally instead of waking up to an alarm. I enjoyed reading his book. The chapters were short and interesting. He ends it with a chapter about the supplements you can take to improve lucid dreaming.

  

Gooseberry Falls

Here is a view of the middle falls. Highway 61 bridge can be seen at the top of the photo.

The drought is officially over.

Here is another view of the falls from a vantage point closer to Lake Superior. I am glad I turned around to see this. I had my eyes to the ground because the path was icy.

Here is the same view zoomed in closer.

The rusty sediment from the Gooseberry River can be seen way out in Lake Superior.

 

Finding The Mother Tree

Suzanne Simard is the author of Finding The Mother Tree: Discovering The Wisdom of the Forest. This is non-fiction, sometimes technical, but totally readable. She relates growing up in the rainforests in British Columbia. Her grandfather and great grandfather were loggers on the family property. Her family did selective logging. After college she went to work for a logging company that did clear cutting. Her job was to decide how to replant the forest. Some of her plantations failed because the logging company wanted only the most valuable trees to be planted. They were not interested in tree biodiversity. Later she worked for the Canadian government. She went to school in Oregon for her masters degree. She thought there was a link between the fungi on the roots of the tree and the health of the tree. She also thought some trees benefitted from the presence of other trees. She found out that fir trees benefitted from alder growing nearby. Standard practice was to cut the alder near a fir tree and treat it with Round Up. Suzanne got push back on her ideas because of her gender and because she was proving that the standard logging practices were not always the best way to go. In studying for her Ph.D. she did an experiment where she added a radioactive element to the structure of a tree. Then she checked the neighboring tree and found the radioactive element was in that tree too so that meant trees communicated and shared their resources. Mixed in with all the science were stories about her family, her marriage and her two children. I found it interesting to learn that trees can distinguish their genetic offspring from other offspring. There is still a lot we don't know about trees and this book is one of the best environmental nature book that I have read in awhile

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Whereabouts

Jhumpi Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize for her book Interpreter of Maladies. I liked that book very much. This time I read Whereabouts which I liked but not as much as Interpreter of Maladies. This short novel is a series of chapters describing the thoughts of a single woman, in her 40's, living somewhere in Italy. She is a college professor and, I think, clinically depressed. Each chapter is like a diary entry and the book covers a year in time. She doesn't appear to be any happier at the end of the book that she was in the beginning. I enjoyed the descriptions of her town including the coffee shop, the bakery, the stationery store and the piazzias.

Count The Ways

Joyce Maynard wrote Count The Ways, a fictional story about a woman named Eleanor. Eleanor is the only child of alcoholic, neglectful parents. When she was 16 they were killed in an auto accident while she was at boarding school. Eleanor is an artist and a writer. While in college she wrote a children's book that did very well. She wrote three more books. With that money she bought a farm in New Hampshire in 1972. That is where she met Cam, a handsome boy man (man who behaves like a boy) who sells wooden bowls made out of burls. He is attracted to Eleanor because of her success, independence, kindness, and her eagerness to please him. The book tells Eleanor's story, her marriage, her three kids, her failures and successes up to her mid 50's. I didn't always agree with Eleanor's decisions but I could understand why she did what she did. I admired Eleanor and I enjoyed this book.

  

The Every

The Every, written by Dave Eggers, is one of the strangest books I have ever read. The Every is a corporation made up of the largest search engine/social media companies that has merged with the largest e-commerce company named after a big forest in South America. Delaney Wells is a woman from Idaho. She is a former forest ranger and not a big fan of technology. She decides to fight the Every from within. Delaney wants to free society from surveillance. She gets a job at their big company in San Francisco. Her plan is to ruin the company by suggesting ideas so intrusive and socially damaging that the Every will fail. Her first idea, presented at her first interview, is an app that will let the user know if their friend is lying to them. Every takes her idea and runs with it ruining friendships and marriages and increasing the suicide rate. Delaney doesn't stop trying. She comes up with more ideas that she is sure will fail. She is wrong again. The book moves quickly through one idea after another at a terrifying speed. This book was hilarious and horrifying and I hope I can sleep tonight.

  

Three Wishes

 Liane Moriarty, the famous author from Sydney, wrote Three Wishes. I enjoyed this fictional tale about Cat, Gemma and Lyn, three sisters. The story is about the 3 sisters 33rd year. Since they are triplets they celebrate birthdays together. At their birthday they read letters they wrote to their future selves at age 8.  In this story the author used a writing technique where a stranger encountered the three sisters with or without their parents and wrote about the impression the family had on them. I thought that was a really clever way to describe the family. This story had great drama including sad moments, scary moments, and laugh out loud funny moments. 

While Mortals Sleep

 While Mortals Sleep is the third and probably final book published of Kurt Vonnegut's after his death. This is a book of 15 short stories. Many of the stories are set in Indiana where he was born. One particularly funny story was about a married man who loved to tinker with his model trains. He has a friend over and they are talking trains. His mother advises him to come up and eat. He says he will be right up but he works on his trains a few more hours. His wife is amazingly patient about him. The next night his mother says he should take his wife out to eat. When he refuses to leave his trains on this night his mother goes out shopping. She comes back with a model plane and she destroys his train set. She goes back upstairs. The man and his friend realize that what they have now looks like a war scene. Now they make plans to reenact war scenes with model planes and model trains.  Most of the chapters start out with one of his drawings. He draws like Picasso. Vonnegut was a creative person with words and with art.

Cilka's Journey

 Heather Morris wrote Cilka's Journey as a sequel to her other novel The Tattoo Artist of Auschwitz. She spoke with Holocaust survivors. She researched records to put together this historical fiction based on a real woman who was born in Czechoslovakia. At age 16 she is put on a train to Auschwitz with her parents and elder sister. When she is freed from the concentration camp by the Russians she is put on trial and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for sleeping with the enemy. As if anyone in a concentration camp had a choice? She is sent to a Gulag inside the arctic circle where winter is completely dark, 24 hours a day, for four months. There she is to work in a coal mine. With luck she gets reassigned to work at the hospital. Cilka uses her wits, her strength, and her charm to survive. Although this book had dark moments, I enjoyed reading about Cilka power to persevere, to help others, and to try and ease the suffering of others.

Brule River

Tonight I went to a lecture by a Wisconsin botanist on vegetation surveys along the  Boise Brule river watershed in northern Wisconsin. He had data from previous surveys in 1920-1922, 1940-1942, 1960-1962 and 2015-2017. The surveys included trees, shrubs and forbs. The reason for the surveys was to find out why the fish restocking wasn't successful. The speaker focused on the boreal forest, the pine barrens, and the white cedar swamps. The vegetation surveys shows plants have changed. The boreal forest is making a comeback. The pine barrens are down to 2 percent of what they once were. The cedar swamps were decimated because farmers used the cedars for fencing. Now it is illegal to cut the white cedar in the Brule watershed but the cedars are not regenerating. Paper birch is on the decline in part because it has a short life span, but also because of fire suppression and climate change. Paper birch does not like the warmer temperatures. Invasive species such as buck thorn and spotted knapweed don't help the situation either.  Some of this lecture was a little bit over my head. I think 80 percent of the audience work in the field of botany where as I am just a beginner. It is healthy for me to be out of my comfort zone some times and I enjoy spending time with intelligent, educated people.

Damnation Spring

 Ash Davidson wrote Damnation Spring. She grew up near redwood forests in California so it makes sense that she would write about the redwood forest logging industry. This story is about the marriage of Rich and Colleen Gunderson and their son Chub. Chub is just starting kindergarten in 1977. Rich is a lumberman. He climbs trees with his chainsaw to prepare them to be logged. They have a loving family. Three squeezes of a hand indicates a silent "I love you." The parents ask Chub, "Where did you get those beautiful eyebrows?"  Chub responds, "I got them at the beautiful eyebrow store." Both Colleen and Rich want a better future for Chub which means they don't want him working as a logger. People are starting to realize the environmental impact of cutting down the redwood tree forests have on the California hills and streams and salmon. Colleen and Rich get their drinking water right out of Damnation Creek. I love family stories and I love environmental stories and I got both in this book.

Our Country Friends

 The plot of Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart is a comic writer, his wife, and 8 year old daughter invite their friends to ride out the pandemic at their estate in the Hudson River Valley. Sasha and Masha Senderovsky have a house in the country surrounded by five guest cottages. The hosts are emigrants from Russia. Sasha's parents had a similar housing compound in Russia and he is trying to duplicate what he knew from his childhood in Russia. He invites his friends, lovers and rivals who coexist while wearing masks and staying six feet apart. One of the guests is an actor who plays the lead role in a television adaptation of Sasha's novels. The actor brings a toxic air to the gathering and when he leaves the atmosphere improves. How the group copes with being together, everyday stresses, too much alcohol consumption and group meals is often funny and passionate. I think it would have been a fun way to ride out the pandemic in the Hudson River Valley.

The Vanishers

 Several times as I was reading The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits I thought I would just return it unfinished. But I plodded along and finished it feeling underwhelmed. In this story Julie is a 22 year old student at an elite psychic institute. Her mentor, jealous of Julie's abilities, throws a psychic attack at her. Julie becomes ill from the attack, withdraws from her studies, and tries to recover her health. Julie is also the narrator of the story and as I read her words I didn't believe half of what she said. She is a very unreliable narrator. The entire book was full of characters who were underhanded and criminal. I was happy to come to the end of this very odd story.

Vampires In The Lemon Grove

I really enjoyed Swamplandia by Karen Russell so I picked up her book of short stories called Vampires In The Lemon Grove. I didn't like it as much as Swamplandia but the stories were interesting and a little scary. A little magic or fantasy in involved in all eight stories. The first story is about a married couple of vampires living in Italy. Instead of drinking blood, they eat lemons to slake their thirst. They debate moving again. They have lived for centuries and have lived all over the world. Just the first story is set in Italy. One interesting story was set in Japan at a silk worm farm. Another story about a group of boys is set in New Jersey. Another story is set in Antarctica. One of my favorite stories is set in a barn in the Midwest. This barn has 18 horses. Exactly half of the horses are former (lesser known) Presidents of the United States. The narrator of the story is the horse that is Rutherford B. Hayes. Karen Russell has quite the imagination.

Old Men At Midnight

 Chaim Potok wrote Old Men At Midnight. This book was published in 2001. This book is a trio of stories that involve men telling their story to Ilana Davita Dinn. In the first story Ilana is 17 years old. She lives in New York City in the 1940's. She tutors a Polish man slightly younger than her in English. Her student is a survivor of the concentration camps. In the second story she is a graduate student escorting a guest lecturer. He tells her about his involvement as a soldier during the Russian Civil War and later as he worked as a KGB agent. In the last story, Ilana is middle aged. She buys a home next to a professor of war who is trying to write his memoir. I enjoyed the middle story the best. I found it odd that Ilana has no role in the stories other than being a listener.

Where the Deer And The Antelope Play

 Nick Offerman wrote Where The Deer And The Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations Of One Ignorant American Who Likes To Walk Outside. Nick Offerman is also an actor who played Ron Swanson in the TV series Parks and Rec. The first few chapters are about hiking at Glacier National Park with two buddies and a guide. I enjoyed that part because I have hiked there too. When he wrote about that one part near Logan Pass where there is a rope railing to hang onto as you walk on the side of a cliff I remembered walking there too. The second half of the book is about his travels in a RV with his wife, Megan Mullaney, during the Covid pandemic. Together they drove around the southwestern states stopping at RV parks and campgrounds. In between these travelogue adventures he goes off on random subjects. Even though I agree with most of his views, the frequency of rants coming out of no where got to be a bit too much for me. 

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The Little Red Chairs

 Edna O'Brian wrote The Little Red Chairs. This novel starts out in Ireland in a small village. A new man comes to town advertising his services as a healer. His name is Vlad and he gives massages and herbal remedies. One woman in town becomes enamored with him. Later he is discovered to be a war criminal. The character in the book is based on a real war criminal currently in prison in Britain by the name of Radovan Karadzic. The title comes from a war memorial in Bosnia with little red chairs symbolizing the children who were killed in the war. The book was okay. I liked the imagery of the little red chairs. What I didn't like was a scene of gratuitous violence toward a woman that I felt was completely unnecessary.

A Carnival of Snackery

 I happened to find a book by David Sedaris that I had not yet read so I grabbed it. A Carnival of Snackery is his collection of diaries from 2003 to 2020, or from age 47 to 64. The book is arranged chronologically. Some entries are short and others go on for pages. The words "a carnival of snackery" were on a menu he read. The author travels frequently so there is much information of his observations from airports and cabs and hotels. He writes frequently about shopping and restaurants. Quite a few of his travels are for book signings and he writes about the people who want his signature. His humor is sometimes over the top and downright offensive. Sometimes he tries to be offensive. Sometimes I was offended. Sometimes I was charmed. David Sedaris looks at the world through eyes much different than my own. I like him for his raw honesty.

Unusual Uses For Olive Oil

 Unusual Uses For Olive Oil was written by Alexander McCall Smith. This author also wrote the series called The Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. I haven't read any of the detective agency stories but I did watch a film version which I thought was very entertaining. This book is also entertaining to me but I don't think everyone would like it. I really struggled through the first two chapters until I got comfortable with the story. The main character is this novel is Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld who lives and works in Regensburg in the Bavarian part of Germany. He wrote a book called Portuguese Irregular Verbs. This guy is one of the strangest dudes I have ever come across in a book. He is an academic, all of his friends are academics, and his humor is academic. This is the fourth book of a series about Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld. I might go back and read the first three. If you enjoy quirky humor, this is the book for you.

The Guest Book

 The Guest Book, written by Sarah Blake, is a lengthy family saga about the Milton family. Ogden and Kitty Milton suffer a tragic loss. To help Kitty recover, Ogden buys an island off the coast of Maine complete with a boat house and a six bedroom home. The year is 1935 and the Milton's appear to have the perfect marriage. Every summer the Milton family comes to the island to enjoy parties, lobster feasts, and reunions. Now in current times, the Milton grandchildren learn that they may have to sell the island because they can't afford to keep it. Some grandchildren can't bear to think of loosing their island. Other grandchildren are eager to sell. The themes of racism, white privilege, and social power are intertwined with the story of the Milton family. Some of the relationships are spelled out clearly and others are only hinted at.