“I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow...”
—Billy Collins
Hello Lovelies—
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Is there anything more luxurious than summer reading?
I love nothing more than hauling a bag of books to the hammock slung outside beneath the largest ponderosa, a place where woodpeckers scrabble up and down the vanilla-scented bark and Shasta daisies sprout. The sky above twirls with birds and clouds. Beneath, a clumped bed of grass and dandelion. Bees hover, heavy-footed, over penstemon while chipmunks forage the fallen sunflower seed in the yard.
I select a book, push off with my foot to set the hammock swaying and head for 18th century Ohio or the windswept hills of Wales or the give in to the luxury and necessity of poetry, the beauty of the world falling from the pages.
This summer my stack is larger than usual and more books arrive each day. Here is some of what I am reading and some of what I recommend this summer. Some old, some new, some yet to come. I hope you will search for these titles on bookshop.org, where you can shop your local independent bookstore online and keep the folks who are in the business of loving books in business.
Nonfiction
True West by Betsy Gaines Quammen
This nonfiction books walks its reader through “a myth museum” of the American West. I marveled over and over how Quammen gained access to so many folks who might otherwise be inclined to slam a door in her face. She has intelligent, spirited, and honest conversations with a diverse cast of characters and is often surprised by what she finds. Anyone living in the U.S should read this book to look at how belief in the toxic myths of the West has given rise to an ever more toxic present.
I a re-reading this book now, after tearing through it in May. I will be forever grateful for Quammen’s coda: an analysis of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, a western I have managed to side-step all these years in my film classes and discussions of the myths of the West. Betsy, you’ve convinced me: it’s on the list.
Two Lights by James Roberts
I discovered this book when I started following Roberts’ Substack, drawn to the poetry of his prose and the way he writes lovingly about the landscape of Wales. The two lights are dawn and dusk, the former about which Roberts writes, “In some of the bleakest times of my life I’ve gone to the hills at dusk just so I an breath, walking to an of the way spot overlooking the valley and mountain’s beyond. There I can find the place inside me that watches, that point of attention beyond the tangled ruminations, observing the transience of things. As the place fades back to its essence, shedding the scar, so do I.”
I can’t wait to walk the Welsh landscape with Roberts.
Fiction
Appleseed by Matt Bell
I mid-read on this one, a tri-part novel set in 18th century Ohio, fifty years in the future during the twin disasters of climate catastrophe and cooperate control, and a thousand years into the future when an ice sheet covers North America. The narrative begins with a faun-like creature who is at work planting apple orchards, an act that is a harbinger of the ways humans disrespect and disrupt eco-systems to their own end. Bell’s prose is muscular as the story alternates between eras and sets of disasters.
The Lost Journals of Sacajawea by Debra Magpie Earling
This book rearranged my molecular structure. and will live with me a long time. It fully immerses the reader in Sacajawea's experience, told in haunting fragments and poetry. It's an important telling of a story everyone thinks they know, one that rightly indicts whiteness and patriarchy as the real arbiters of savagery in the American West. Earling gives us an unapologetically indigenous point of view, one that essentially channels Sacajawea, whose truth-telling and witnessing effectively shatters the form of the novel. BRAVA. Read this book and then read Perma Red. Earling is an American treasure.
Poetry
Refuge by Pamela Uschuk
This book has me in its crosshairs. My heart cracked wide open when I heard Uschuk read “Green Flame” earlier this summer, a poem about living and dying and the life of a single hummingbird parallel to Uschuk’s own life as she tries to survive the cure for cancer. No one writes about birds, refugees in this time of climate crisis, the way Pam does, but this book also examines—clear-eyed, ferociously, radiantly—other refugees (people from homelands, animals from place, families from each other, a body from itself)—-so many in a broken world in which Uschuk’s words dredge light and beauty from alienation and despair.
The People’s Field by Haesong Kwon
I am still waiting for my copy of Kwon’s book to arrive. It has recently been re-issued by Bull City Press (you can order it here) but I also heard Kwon read recently and I have never witnessed a quieter more powerful poet. His whispered words carved spaciousness and light in air. I was riveted, listening to “sounds, ideas, and histories of the Korean peninsula,” told through the lens of family, during and after the Korean war and the Japanese occupation.
Forthcoming
Three Keys by Laura Pritchett (July 16th, 2024)
Colorado folks will recognize Laura Pritchett who has written a number of novels set in the set focusing on small communities. In Three Keys, Pritchett produces light-hearted, “beachy” read perfect for summer. Here is the book’s teaser:
Ammalie Brinks has just lost the three keys of her life’s purpose—her husband, her job, and her role as a mom after her son went off to college. She’s also mystified to find herself in middle age—how exactly had that happened? The idea of becoming irrelevant, invisible, of letting her life vaguely slip away—well, the terror of that has her driving through Nebraska with a fork in her hair. What she does have is this: three literal keys, saved in a drawer for years. Keys to homes she hopes will be empty, from her and her husband's past--homes she plans on breaking into.
Becoming Littleshell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home by Chris La Tray (August 20th, 2024)
I can’t remember how I first heard of Chris La Tray only one day I was getting his Substack letters before I even knew what Substack was and I was an instant fan. I have long anticipated his upcoming memoir. Chris’ prose is wonderful mixture of blunt and wry observation combined with gorgeous prose (Chris is also Montana’s poet laureate.
Here is the book’s blurb: Growing up in Western Montana, Chris La Tray always identified as Indian. While the representation of Indigenous people was mostly limited to racist depictions in toys and television shows, and despite the fact that his father fiercely denied any connection, he found Indians alluring, often recalling his grandmother’s consistent mention of their Chippewa heritage.
When La Tray attended his grandfather’s funeral as a young man, he finally found himself surrounded by relatives who obviously were Indigenous. “Who were they?” he wondered. “Why didn’t I know them? Why was I never allowed to know them?” Catalyzed by the death of his father two decades later, La Tray embarks on a sprawling investigation. He takes a DNA test, which offers the first key clue to his heritage: a family tree. He scours the archives of used bookstores, interviews family, and travels to powwows, book fairs, and conferences. Combining diligent research with a growing number of encounters with Indigenous authors, activists, elders, and historians, he slowly pieces together his family history, and eventually seeks enrollment with the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians.
I hope you will pick up one or two of these books and wish you lots of reading time this summer—surely one of the best respites from this aching world. Drop me a line if something grabs you and let me know what’s on your shelf that you’d recommend.
Happy Reading!
Thank you for reading.
Big love,
Karen
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