Ellie And The Harpmaker

 Ellie And The Harpmaker is a pleasure book written by Hazel Prior. Set in rural England Ellie is exploring a neighborhood near her home when she comes upon a sign indicating a harpmaker. She enters the yard and meets a man named Dan. Dan has 32 harps already made and he shows them to Ellie. Because Ellie is wearing red socks he gives her a beautiful red harp made from cherry wood. She is interested in the harp but the gift is too extravagant. This is our first clue that Dan may be on the autism spectrum. Dan insists that she take it so she does. When she gets home and tells her husband, Clive, what happened he insists she return the harp to the harpmaker. Elsie does this and Dan says he will not sell it to anyone else, that the harp is hers, and that she can come and play her harp whenever she wants to. I don't want to give away the ending but the interactions between Ellie and Dan change both of them in a good way. This was a lovely story about two kind people.

Kingsbury Creek Trail

 One of the reasons I chose to enroll in the hiking class at Senior U was to get some exercise while meeting other people. The other reason I chose to join up was to learn more trails to take. Last week we walked the Chester Creek trail that I have walked many times before. This week we hiked the Kingsbury Creek trail which was new to me. We parked at the trail head right next to the Lake Superior Zoo. We hiked over a creek (on a bridge) and then hiked up the hill so far I could see and hear the traffic on Highway 35. We hiked across the top of the hill towards Spirit Mountain before coming down again. We had a few drops of rain in the first five minutes but otherwise the weather was great. The weather was cloudy so I didn't have to wear my sun hat which is nice because I can see more without wearing a hat all the time. At first I worried I wouldn't be able to physically keep up with the group but I found I am doing just fine. I stay near the front. Some people are much slower walkers and we often have to stop and wait for them to catch up. I have learned to avoid the man who wears shorts and a cowboy hat because he plays music on his phone constantly and he likes John Denver very much. I think playing music while hiking with a group in the woods is a tad rude so I just avoid him. We were encouraged to bring our hiking sticks if we had them. I have some yet for some reason I hardly ever use them. I used them today and they came in handy especially when we had to climb up some rocks that were farther apart than is comfortable for someone my height. On the way back I thought I heard a lion roar. I forgot we parked by the zoo.

Welcome To Hard Times

 Welcome To Hard Times was the first book E. L. Doctorow wrote. He had a job as an editor in New York City. He saw the poor quality of the many western book that we published and thought he could do better. So he did. Even though he lived an urban life he wrote a cowboy story. This is set in Dakota Territory a few years after the civil war. The town of Hard Times has a windmill, a saloon, a store, and a stable. The wagon train comes by once in a while and the town is set close enough to a gold mine that the miners come to town on weekends. One day a man from Bodie comes to visit. The man from Bodie is a psychopath. He pillages, rapes and murders. On top of that he sets the buildings on fire before leaving.  One of the men in the town, Blue, (played by Henry Fonda in the movie version) rescues an injured woman named Molly and the newly orphaned boy Jim. He tries to rebuild the town. Eventually the town gets fairly close to normal. Molly wants revenge on the man from Bodie. Molly poisons the mind of the young Jim and calls Blue a coward. The movie version stays mostly true to the book except for the ending. In the book the author makes the point that life is fragile and unfair. In the movie we have a mostly happy ending. I can see why Hollywood declined to produce such a depressing and dismal story. E. L. Doctorow hated the movie and called it "The second worst movie ever made." I enjoy western books and I enjoyed this one. The movie was good too. Henry Fonda was a great actor.

Billy Bathgate

I am still reading the works of E.L. Doctorow for the class I am taking on Tuesdays. This time I finished Billy Bathgate. Billy is a poor 15 year old boy living in the Bronx with his Irish mother who is not mentally well. She works in a laundry and Billy loves her.  The book never specifies the year but I would guess it is the 1930's. He lives across the street from an orphanage and he often hangs out with the kids there. Billy has learned to juggle. One day his juggling skills are noticed by a gangster named Dutch Schulz. Billy ends up working for the mobster running errands and spying on people. Any earnings Billy gets he shares with his mother. Billy witnesses crimes, murders, and a trial where Dutch Schulz is acquitted. He also gets fed better than he did at home and he gets to travel, stay in nice hotels, see upstate New York for the first time and even go to the horse races at Saratoga Springs.  I thought it was interesting to look at the life and activities of mobsters through the eyes of a 15 year old boy. Billy was always evaluating and judging them but was careful in what he said. Billy had street smarts. The book won several awards and I can see why.

Collected Stories

I just finished reading Collected Stories by E. L. Doctorow. He compiled these short stories and put them in a book shortly before his death. The book includes 15 stories and one of them was really familiar. It turns out that he expanded that story into the book called City of God which I already read. I bought the book because I needed to read one of stories called Wakefield. This is a story that was turned into a 2016 movie with Bryan Cranston and Jennifer Garner. I enjoyed all the stories but was especially satisfied by reading the one named Jolene.  

NRRI

 

This evening I got to tour the NRRI (Natural Resources Research Institute) in Hermantown. This crazy building was designed to withstand an atom bomb in case the USSR fired one at us over the North Pole. The walls are 18 inch thick and cement. There is a huge elevator inside because once the government sold it to IBM they needed a large elevator to bring computers upstairs. Back in the 60's computers were large. The building was abandoned in the 1970's. NRRI acquired it in 1980 they started doing research on wood, rocks and water. I am helping with stream quality by inspecting Chester Creek and growing E Coli in my house and because of that we got a grand tour. We got to go in biohazard labs where they search for the Covid DNA and RNA. This institute has 177 research projects going on at the current time including the blue green algae that can emit toxins research. I had a fascinating evening nerding out with the scientists.

Cute Orange Mushroom

 

Happy Equinox

 Tomorrow is the first full day of fall. My summer of 2022 was really a fine season. I was outside frequently. I saw lots of wildlife. I went on a road trip to the east coast and back again through Canada. I have been healthy and happy. I enjoyed sleeping with the windows open. But now fall has come and the temperature in my city will be 20 degrees cooler tomorrow than today. Also, I have gone back to school. I am attending Senior U at the University of Minnesota. Today I had two classes. My first class was on the works of E.L. Doctorow. Today we focused on the book Welcome To Hard Times and also watched part of the movie starring Henry Fonda. My second class is about world  heritage sites. World heritage sites are named by UNESCO which is part of the United Nations.  Sites can be natural or cultural or a mix of both. Today we studied two sites. I have been to the Great Barrier Reef so it was fun to revisit that. Pictures don't do it justice. I think it is more beautiful when you are wearing a wet suit and floating in the water that causes the soft coral to sway in the currents. We also studied the Taj Mahal which is something I would love to see someday. I will be busy three days a week for the next eight weeks. I am grateful that I live only a 35 minute walk away so I don't have to deal with parking up there. Happy Equinox!

The Power And The Glory

 The Power And The Glory was written by Graham Greene and published in 1940. Time Magazine listed this book as one of the top one hundred English written novels since 1923. The story is set in the Tabasco area of Mexico in the late 1920's. At that time the government of Mexico closed many Catholic churches and banned Catholics from gathering together. In most areas of Mexico, this ban was not enforced. In the Tabasco area the ban was strictly enforced. Priests were forced to marry or face death. In this novel the story follows an unnamed "whiskey priest." A whiskey priest is an alcoholic priest who engages in sin. This whiskey priest is in hiding because government officials are looking for him. Various people he meets along the way beg him to hear their confession or to say a mass and sometimes he does if they pay him enough. In his journey trying to evade the officials he comes upon a village where he once lived. He meets his former lover and their ten year old daughter. He does not feel regret when he meets his daughter. Throughout the story there is a lot of travel on foot and by mule. Many times the whiskey priest swims across a river or hides in a barn. I had never heard of the persecution of the Catholic faith in Mexico; not that I know much Mexican history. The book held much suffering so I was glad the book is  not very long.

Dear Miss Metropolitan

 Dear Miss Metropolitan is a crime novel written by Carolyn Ferrell. She based her book on the Ariel Castro kidnapping in Ohio. This book is set in New York rather than Ohio but involves three women being kidnapped and tortured by a man in his house for ten years. One of the women has a child. Another woman becomes pregnant repeatedly but the captor, known as "Boss Man," beats her until she miscarries. The story is told by each of the three women, the child (when she is an adult), and one of the neighbors who was a newspaper reporter known as Miss Metropolitan. I enjoyed reading the story about Fern, Gwin, and Jesenia. Their strength and courage and dedication to each other is what helped through the unspeakable tragedy.

Saving Ruby King

Catherine Adel West is the author of Saving Ruby King. This novel is set in the south side of Chicago in present times. When Ruby King's mother is found dead, the teenaged Ruby is left to live at home with her violent father. Her best friend, Layla, tries to help her. Layla's father, a pastor and childhood friend of Ruby's father, tells Layla to stay out of Ruby's life. I thought this was a very engrossing story about family secrets and how the power of friendship can shape the future. Everybody could use a friend like Layla.

 

The Book Of Daniel

 Next week I start classed at Senior U at the University of MN in Duluth. One of my classes will be on the works of E.L. Doctorow so that is why I read The Book Of Daniel. The story is about a family of four living in the Bronx in 1950 when the father is arrested. Soon the mother is also arrested. The two children, Daniel and Susan, are sent to live with an aunt, then to an orphanage, and finally adopted by a married man and woman who are friends of the family. The story is loosely based on the Rosenberg family. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed via electric chair in June of 1953. The author changed the children from two boys to a boy and a girl. He changed other details as well. He tries to capture the McCarthy era. He also tries to capture the hippie era of the 1960's when Daniel is trying to investigate what happened to his parents. In doing so he makes Daniel out to be a absolute jerk, a domestic abuser, and possibly a criminal, There is nothing to like about Daniel. The actual children of the Rosenbergs turned out to be normal people so I don't know why the author went in this direction. Sometimes the author changes the point of view from one person to another within the same sentence which drives me batty. I found one paragraph with no punctuation at all. I really enjoyed the author's other book, Homer and Langley, but was disappointed with this one.

The Four Winds

 Kristin Hannah writes historical fiction and I already read her story about World War Two in France called The Nightengale. This time I read The Four Winds. This story is set in Texas during the depression and the Dust Bowl Era. Elsa Martinella is the wife of Rafe and the mother of two children. She and her family lives on a farm with Rafe's Sicilian parents. Rafe prefers to drown his sorrows in whiskey rather than face up to the problems. When the dust storms start coming, he abandons his family and is never heard from again. Elsa's son nearly dies from having so much dust in his lungs so she is forced to take her children west to California. From there the story reads like The Grapes Of Wrath. Elsa struggles in California as the farm owners treat the migrant workers terribly. This sad story is a part of American history and it helps me realize I don't have it so bad.

DWP Trail

 This evening I joined a group of native plant enthusiasts on the DWP (Duluth Winnipeg and Pacific railroad bed) trail near the very end of Skyline Parkway near Midway Road west of Duluth. We were joined by Jeffrey Flory who is an Invasive Species Specialist for the 1854 Treaty Authority. There were quite a few invasive species by the parking lot probably brought in by the trucks and equipment when the parking lot was upgraded. Because of his occupation he can spot non native species quicker than native species. We went for a two hour hike pointing out the plants and trees and shrubs. We had a perfect evening for this weather wise. I even got a little snack from a high bush cranberry plant. My idea of a good time is hanging out in nature with people who can tell me what I am looking at. Here is a picture of a very tall Juneberry tree.

The Club

Ellery Lloyd is the author of The Club. Actually Ellery Lloyd is a fictitious name of a husband and wife writing team based in London. This is a mystery crime novel set in an exclusive club on an island off the coast of England. The island can be driven to only in low tide. This is a place where the rich and famous can let their hair down without being caught by paparazzi. The owners of the new club, Ned and Adam are worried about cost over runs and keeping  their business afloat. Tempers flare and outbursts occur. In my opinion this book had too many characters and moved slowly. Mystery fans would probably like it more than I did.

  

Matrix

I loved the book Matrix by Lauren Groff. Set in medieval times, Marie de France is banished from Eleanor of Aquitaine's court because the is the bastard daughter of the king, too tall and skinny, and too educated to be made a wife. She is sent to an abbey in the countryside. Once she gets there, at age 17, she finds the nuns are starving and many are diseased. At first she is taken aback by these circumstances. Then she takes action. She exerts her leadership. She adds a scriptorium to the abbey. The nuns transcribe texts which is a bold move because only men are deemed capable of that. By charging under market value for the texts, the abbey starts making money. The procedure of having the nuns do the work they are the least capable of doing (to serve as penance) is overturned and she has nuns doing the work at which they excel. For years local farmers have not been paying rent to the abbey and the former abbess didn't insist on rent because that might look bad on the abbey. Marie makes an example of the most flagrant family taking advantage of the abbey and after that all the farmers catch up on their rent. Over the years of her leadership the abbey has more nuns, plenty of food to eat, a flock of sheep and goats and cows. This story illustrates the sheer power of female creativity in a corrupt world. 

 

One Italian Summer

 Rebecca Serle is the author of One Italian Summer, a novel set in California and Positano, Italy. The main character is Katy. Katy if grief stricken at the death of her mother, Carol. Katy and Carol had planned a summer is Positano together but her mother died before it could happen. Carol had spent the summer in Italy before, many years ago, and wanted to share her favorite spots with her daughter. So Katy goes by herself. Here is where the magic (not a big fan) comes in. Katy meets Carol at the age Carol was when she was there the first time. The younger version of her mother is not what Katy expected. In my opinion, this is a silly story but I did enjoy the descriptions of the scenery and the Italian food.

Dancing With Dogs

 I think it's ironic that Jon Katz wrote Dancing Dogs which is a book about dogs and his last name is Katz. This book is a collection of 16 short stories involving dogs. In one of the stories a woman starts a business taking her dogs to parties and nursing homes and entertaining them by dancing along with her dogs. Many of the dogs are rescues and many of the people rescuing the dogs are they themselves rescued by their canine companion. One story is set on a sheep farm where the sheep herding dog has just passed away. This dog's companion was larger than the dog but had learned to herd sheep effectively. When the farmer gets another sheep herding dog, this former sheep herding dog's companion is miffed and won't let the new dog do it's work. The farmer puts it in the barn as punishment and lets the new dog do the herding. The animal in the barn declines to the point where the farmer calls the vet. The vet listens to the story and tells the farmer what to do. The farmer must buy another donkey because the animal in the barn being punished does  not know it is a donkey but instead it thinks of itself as a dog. I didn't see that one coming. I enjoyed the 16 stories about dogs.

Waiting For Bojangles

Waiting For Bojangles was written by Oliver Bourdeaut in French and translated into English. I was attracted to the artwork on the cover. The story is told by a young schoolboy. He talks about his parents and the family pet, an African crane named Mademoiselle Superfluous.  The boy gets into trouble at school because his parents keep him home so frequently. Eventually he drops out of school. His mother is eccentric and his father is too. They don't open their mail but let it pile up in a corner of the house. His parent's favorite things to do is dance to Nina Simone's recording of the song Mr. Bojangles. They also like to travel to their other house in Spain. After a tax assessor comes to visit, the boy's mother's mental health begins to deteriorate quickly. The boy and his father try to protect her from the world and the world from her. The novel beautifully tells of the great lengths people will go to protect the ones they love. 

Friction

This is my first book by the prolific writer Sandra Brown. Friction is a mystery/thriller/romance book featuring a Texas Ranger named Crawford and a Texas judge named Holly. Holly is presiding over Crawford's custody case. Crawford's 5 year old daughter is living with his deceased wife's parents. After the death of his wife Crawford spiraled down into a depression and heavy drinking. Now he is back on his feet and wants his daughter back. The grandparents do not want to give the daughter back and they took him to court. During the court proceeding as Crawford is on the stand, a gunman breaks into the courtroom and starts shooting. Crawford reacts like a Texas Ranger would and saves the judge's life. The story was fine but I thought Crawford was a total douche bag. I didn't like his character at all. 

Pure Colour

I read Sheila Heti's novel Pure Colour but I really didn't get it. This is one of those "up in the clouds" novel that don't appeal to me. The main character is Mira. She is in college. She is close to her father and when he dies his spirit enters her. That is weird. Mira decides there are 3 kinds of people: fish egg people, bird egg people, and bear egg people. Bears don't lay eggs! Later in the story Mira and her father enter a leaf in a tree in a park. She leaves her human body that she shares with her dead father and becomes a leaf. For chapters they are in a leaf. Mira decides to leave the leaf once she sees a friend walk by. I probably should have never finished reading this book but it was short and I thought it would get better.  

Water Is Life

 Today I volunteered for the non-profit Water Legacy at the Water Is Life Festival at Bayfront Park in Duluth. I stood at a table and spoke with festival participants about protecting our water from the dangers of copper mining. We answered questions and invited people to join the email list to get updates. We handed out many petitions to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to do something to improve the bodies of water that they decided are impaired. I learned so much today from the woman I was working with but also from the people who visited our booth. Plus I got to listen to fine music playing. If I was smarter I would have brought a jacket in which case I might have stayed until 9 p.m. when the Indigo Girls started to play.

The Dutch Wife

The Dutch Wife is a historical fiction novel written by Ellen Keith. This book is about World War Two. Marijke de Graaf are deported from Amsterdam and taken two two different concentration camps because they spoke up against the treatment of the Jewish people. Marijke is given a choice. She can stay at the concentration camp and be worked to death or transfer to the camp where her husband is and work in a brothel. I appreciated her story and the story of Karl Muller who worked as an officer at the camp. Woven into the story is Luciano Wagner who is imprisoned in Argentina by the military. I don't get why his story is written into this novel. The violence he experienced during his imprisonment was over the top and became too much for me. I wish the author had kept the story in Amsterdam and Germany and never went to Argentina. 

City Of God

 Last week I read Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow and this week I read City of God. I really didn't like City Of God. This novel was about New York City but it was structured to read like a private journal of a novelist. The book  had no chapters and no quotation marks. The topics were willy nilly and the whole book was discombobulated. Several pages, here and there, were song lyrics and interpretations of song lyrics. One story was about a metallic cross at a Catholic church was stolen from the wall and later found on the roof of a Jewish synagogue. The priest from the church and the lady Rabbi investigate the mystery. The author included a lot of information about the Holocaust. I just didn't care for this messy novel. 

Tracy Flick Can't Win

 Tom Perrotta is the author of Tracy Flick Can't Win. I understand now that this is a sequel to Election, a story of when Tracy Flick was running for president of her high school class. Now Tracy Flick is an adult working at Green Meadow High School as the assistant principal. She has a ten year old daughter and she is a single mother. The story is told quickly in short chapters narrated by various characters. Tracy has to deal with the politics of the parents, the teachers, and the school board members on top of the patriarchy of the education system. When the principal finally announces he is retiring, Tracy seems to be the best candidate to replace him. I enjoyed the story. The ending was surprising.