Words, Women, and Wonder: BookMarks Update #81 April, 2025

Spring has returned to New England with stunning displays of flowering trees and spring bulbs. The succession of magnolias to cherry and apple trees and on to dogwoods and redbuds is a beautiful reminder of nature's order and yet another message that while we will not always be here to witness this order and beauty, it will continue without us.

April brought our return from a month in England and 10 days in Morocco, and the list of books I read this month reflects the wonder of travel as well as the dislocation I experience when away from home. Here are the books I read in April:

Among these eleven books, there were two books and three essays that stood out for me, all written by women.

Olivia Laing's "Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency" is the third book by Laing that I've read, and like the other two, it's a gem. Written at the end of Trump's first term, parts can feel a bit dated in sections related to politics and especially those with esoteric details about the UK, but her essays on artists, writers, and books are terrific. I especially enjoyed her brief bios on women artists and writers. Along with Geoff Dyer, Laing is my favorite commentator on life in today's Britain.

A second book which I loved was Michiko Kakutani's "Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread" one of the genre of books that provide lists and reviews of books "you must read''. The shelf to my right in my Vermont library has over a dozen of these books from Harold Bloom's "How to Read and Why" with its lists of novels, short stories, poems, and plays to Susan Hill's list of the forty books she would take to a desert island in "Howards End is on the Landing."

Kakutani's book is a fine addition to this shelf providing brief summaries of more than 150 books by authors from Dr. Seuss to Don DeLillo, from T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden to the letters of Van Gogh and Flaubert. Even with all of my reading, I have read barely 1/3 of her selections, and her vividly written 2-3 page summaries of each book left me with several 'must read' additions to my To Be Read notebook. Her book is yet another resource along with BookMarks that might provide an answer to that age-old existential question of "What should I read Next?"

The three extraordinary essays were published in "The Best American Essays 2024", the 39th edition of a series that began in 1986 with Robert Atwan as the series editor and Elizabeth Hardwick as the guest editor. All 39 volumes in the series sit on a shelf in my Vermont library, gathered lovingly over many years at a multitude of used bookstores from Cape Cod to Cape Reyes. While Atwan wrote the foreword and chose the editor for each volume, the guest editor chooses the essays, and they reflect the personal interests, life history, and writing style of each from Edwidge Danticat to Adam Gopnik, Ian Frazier to Kathryn Schulz---each volume a remarkable and unique collection of writing.

This year's guest editor was Wesley Morris, the Pulitzer Prize winning critic-at-large at the "New York Times". Among the 22 essays he chose for this year's volume were three that deeply affected me. "Mere Belief" which first appeared in "Harper's" is Sallie Tisdale's exploration of memory in the writing of memoir. It's a deep dive into the neuroscience and the personal experience of remembering---the selective, imperfect, and subjective process by which we recall the events of our life and weave them together into the narrative by which we define ourselves. It's a fine piece of writing, and having read Tisdale, I'll never read a memoir in the same way.

The second powerful essay was by Jennifer Senior, an editor at The Atlantic. "The Ones We Sent Away" tells the story of her Aunt Adele who because of her severe developmental delays was 'placed' in the barbaric Willowbrook School in New York at age three and written out of her family's story. The description of how Senior and her mother reclaimed responsibility for Adele's life many years later and the potential unlocked by a loving and supportive environment for Adele touched me deeply. My own family had a similar experience in which an older sister of mine was 'removed' from our house to 'protect' the new child and erased from my family's world and narrative. Like Senior, later in life with the urging of my wise and loving wife, I discovered Beverly and was able to move her from a state hospital in Illinois to a community setting in which she could be lovingly cared for. Sadly, and unlike Adele, she never walked, talked, or recognized us or my parents, who after many years, came to terms with this life-changing reality late in their lives.

The third essay in the 2024 volume which strongly affected me was "If Not Now, Later" by Yiyan Li. It was published in "The New Yorker" and contains an "OMG" sentence in the middle of this personal essay which is ostensibly about her garden. The sentence delivers shocking news recalling Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" in which Mrs. Ramsay's death is conveyed to the reader as almost an aside. My concern about a spoiler alert prevents more detail. Read it!

The other books on this month's reading list were my usual potpourri of a little of this and a little of that. I was introduced to a new thriller writer, Mark Gearney, by Bill who shares his monthly readings with me via email. Gearney has written a Gray Man novel annually since launching the series in 2009, and the first two. "The Gray Man"and "On Target" were ideal companions for the long trans-Atlantic flights. Court Gentry is the Gray Man, an assassin and a very good one at that. The bodies pile up in these two books, but be assured that he only kills bad guys and for a good cause. Though unlikely to receive a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize, these books reminded me of Lee Child's fine early efforts, and that's high praise. Not sure I'll continue to read others in the series, but if you're not turned off by blood and violence, these could be good summer beach reading.

Patrick Hutchison's "Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures of a Clueless Craftsman" does for carpentry, plumbing, and roofing what Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods" did for hiking the Appalachian Trail----provide a bunch of laugh out loud stories! Hutchison, searching for meaning and purpose in his early 30's, buys a decrepit cabin at the end of a swamp on appropriately named Wit's End Road for $7500 off of Craigslist and proceeds to fix it up over two years, helped by similarly clueless friends. Anyone who is handy with tools or, like me, doesn't know one end of a router from a mitre box saw, will enjoy this self-deprecating, very funny book which has a happy ending to boot.

Robin Wall Kimmerer's "The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World" and Derek Jarman's "Derek Jarman's Garden" use the garden to express their inclusive and communal approach to saving our planet. Kimmerer argues for a move away from the destructive, winners vs. losers, capitalist economic model of shortages to a model of sharing the abundance of nature to save the world through sharing its bounty. Jarman, a creative movie maker, writer, set designer, and gardener who I first came across in Olivia Laing's books, describes how he bought Prospect Cottage, an abandoned fishing cottage on the shingled shore of Kent within view of the Dungeness Nuclear Power Station. In this unlikely setting and dying of AIDS, he created, a beautiful garden, a defiant, affirming, and powerful demonstration of the human spirit.

Helen Hanff was a college dropout writing plays and TV scripts from her studio apartment on 92nd Street in Manhattan in 1949 when she noticed an advertisement in the "Saturday Review of Literature" from an antiquarian bookstore in London. Writing to "Dear Sirs", she requested help finding a list of books she wanted, and FRD at Marks & Co. responded with a formal letter to "Dear Madam" and two of her selections within a couple of weeks. That exchange began 20 years of letters as Dear Madam became Helene and FRD became Frank. These letters comprise "84, Charing Cross Road", the address of Marks & Co., the antiquarian bookshop. Hanff sent lists and payments in the form of currency stuffed into envelopes as well as care packages of ham, eggs, nylons, and other items in short supply in post WWII London, and Doel was eventually joined in letter writing by his wife and older daughter. I won't give away the ending of this charming book which I reread every couple of years and which I buy whenever I come across it in a used book store so I can gift it to a friend. It's a love story written to books, friends, and the days of writing letters. If you don't know it, rush out, buy it, and read it. It also lends itself nicely to reading out loud to your love partner.

"Letters to Yves" by Pierre Berge and translated by Jose Abete is a moving tribute to Yves St. Laurent written after his death by his husband and lover of 50 years. Bookended by the elegy Berge gave at the funeral and the remarks he made at the first anniversary of St. Laurent's death, the letters to the deceased Yves are both a tribute to a great creative genius as well as a detailed and frank view of the relationship's joys and challenges. The book was given to us by its translator, Jose Abete one of our hosts at Olinto, a spectacular resort high in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Jose and Fabrizio Ruspoli have created Olinto, a beautiful retreat of nine pavilions amidst lush gardens and spectacular mountain views, and when they hosted us for cocktails one night, Jose gave us this jewel of a book. It might be hard to find in the US, but worth the effort.

Finally, "On Giving Up" by an English psychoanalyst starts with the eponymous essay about the difference between the positive action of 'giving up' something that is destructive (e.g. smoking) and giving up on life and committing suicide. Thought provoking and challenging, that first chapter was the highlight of the book. The rest left me a bit confused and muddled. No need to read it.

And now onto poetry. April is National Poetry Month, and while I was tempted to spend the entire month reading poetry, that would likely have resulted in an all time low number of Bookmark's readers. So I decided to celebrate the occasion with just four poems by one poet, Linda Pastan. Not a household name, Pastan, who died in 2023, has written 15 volumes of poetry over 44 years with everyday language enriching beautiful vignettes of everyday life. Her collected and selected work "Carnival Evening" published in 1998 is worth reading from front to back. Here are several of her poems:

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