Vacation reading: After Rain, The Peabody Sisters, Gramercy Park, and Wildwood

Ok, Wildwood: a Journey Through Trees I mostly read before vacation, but finished on Saturday. Roger Deakin, who died before this book was published, was a fascinating man. He renovated his Elizabethan farmhouse, which was more or less a ruin when he bought it, and was well known for his nature writing. What I most enjoyed about Wildwood is his delight in his subjects, whether the rooks in a nearby wood, the people who love the natural world as he does, artists, trees, hedges — he was apparently insatiably curious about the planet and the people on it and I learned all kinds of interesting things as I read, from how cricket bats are made to where apple trees originated. I found this book while shelf-reading (a project in libraries, in our case undertaken every summer, whereby staff compare a list of books that should be on the shelf to the actual books on the shelf, to check that they are where they should be). It was a serendipitous find of the highest order. I’d like to read Deakin’s other work, if only for the language. Here’s a bit from a chapter on a trip to the Pyrenees:

“We collect sweet, fresh chestnuts, easing them from their hedgehog husks. Following a steep-sided holloway veined with the exposed roots of beech, holly, hazel, chestnut, maple, ash, and oak, we drink from the woodland springs. As noon approaches, crickets begin singing hesitantly, and young lizards venture on to the sunny track.”

Even if I wasn’t already interested in his subject (and I am a little bit tree mad since reading The Hidden Life of Trees), I’d read that all day.

On our vacation to Maine last week — the first weeklong trip the Computer Scientist and I took alone in nearly three decades — I packed only a few books. One I’d been wanting to read for some time: The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism by Megan Marshall. I reviewed her book about Margaret Fuller back when I was still writing a column, but this book came to me via my neighbor, who loved it. You may recall I wrote here about her family inviting me to choose books from her collection after she died — this was one of those titles. I’d been waiting for a good time to read it. I figured a week in Maine was a good time to take on a meaty history book and it was. I really thoroughly enjoyed it, both because the Peabody sisters are fascinating women and because I love learning about the history of New England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Marshall spent twenty years working on this book, explaining in her introduction that she had to learn to read the sisters’ handwriting and that of their family and friends in order to complete her research. I really respect the effort that went into the book, and the fascinating details of the may interwoven lives the Peabody sisters touched. If you don’t know much about them, the eldest, Elizabeth, coined the term “transcendentalism” before any of the men who later made it famous, and was an incredibly gifted thinker and writer. Her legacy to aAmerica, among other things, is kindergarten. Mary, the middle sister, was a teacher and writer who helped Elizabeth with her work and later, helped her husband, Horace Mann, with his. The youngest, Sophia, was an artist and also married Nathaniel Hawthorne. Marshall brings them and the people they knew to life, illuminating the social, cultural, and religious environment that shaped them and the day to day lives they led. I thoroughly enjoyed The Peabody Sisters and would like to wander around Boston and Salem visiting the places where these fascinating women lived and worked. I’d also like to read biographies of some of the rest of their circle, starting with Horace Mann.

When I was just about finished with The Peabody Sisters we visited Elements, a used bookstore, coffee house and bar in Biddeford (much like Book & Bar in Portsmouth. I was fairly restrained in my purchasing, but I did buy Gramercy Park: an American Bloomsbury by Carole Klein. It seemed to be similar in spirit to Marshall’s book; rather than covering one family’s impact on a period, it covers one neighborhood’s impact on several periods. Klein begins with Samuel Ruggles, who wished to preserve some open space as Manhattan expanded north, and began planning to create the neighborhood with its exclusive park in the center in 1831. By the 1840’s homes were being built around the park. Straight through the 1930s, when Klein’s book ends, a parade of interesting New Yorkers lived in Ruggles’ lovely neighborhood, and many more visited. I enjoyed reading about the many writers and artists but also about people I knew less about, like architect Stanford White and inventor and Cooper Union founder Peter Cooper, critic, novelist, artist Carl Van Vechten (who was a close friend of Gertrude Stein, James Weldon, Langston Hughes, Bessie Smith, and F. Scott Fitzgerald). Again the book made me want to walk the neighborhood — I’ve been to the Strand several times and never realized how close I was to Gramercy Park. Klein wrote several other books that I am interested in tracking down.

My final vacation read was a collection of William Trevor’s short stories, After Rain, that I found on the free cart at work (librarian benefits: we see donations before anyone else does). I’d never read the much acclaimed Trevor but as longtime bookconscious readers know, I enjoy short fiction. This book was a little sadder than I am in the mood for lately — world, local and family events offer enough difficult emotions for the time being. But I persevered because Trevor really is a master at this form. “The Piano Tuner’s Wives” and the title story were my two favorites. The former opens simply: “Violet married the piano tuner when he was a young man. Belle married him when he was old.” The story goes on to tell of the two marriages, “He had given himself to two women; he hadn’t withdrawn himself from the first, he didn’t from the second.” It’s a lovely story.

“After Rain” is set in in a little “pensione” in a small town in Italy where a woman named Harriet visited for years with her parents, and has fled when a relationship ended. In a rain storm, Harriet takes shelter in the “Church of Santa Fabiola” and looks at an Annunciation, “by an unknown artist, perhaps of the school of Filippo Lippi, no one is certain.” When Harriet walks back to her hotel, she is still thinking of the painting: “While she stands alone among the dripping vines she cannot make a connection that she knows is there. There is a blankness in her thoughts, a density that feels like muddle also, until she realizes: the Annunciation was painted after rain. Its distant landscape, glimpsed through arches, has the temporary look that she is seeing now. It was after rain that the angel came: those first cool moments were a chosen time.” Beautiful. And true — I’ve felt that way, where the connection I was trying to make was just beyond me.

The painting Trevor refers to is this one:

Annunciation
1497
Panel, 176 x 170 cm
Duomo, Volterra, by Fra Bartolomeo and Mariotto Albertinelli

I wrote not that long ago about attending a talk at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum about another annunciation painting and buying a book abut the exhibit. On Sunday, just before we moved the former Teen the Elder (now nearly 24) out of his house in Boston, we stopped at the Museum of Fine Arts to see the Botticelli exhibit, which included some works by Fillipo Lippi. I’ve always loved when my reading and life intersect.

 

 

 

 

 

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Vacation reading: The Prime Minister’s Secret Agent, An Unexpected Twist, Tiny House Living, My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry; plus, The Chapel by Michael Downing.

On Friday I got home from a week of travel to see each of my parents. And I did something radical, for me — I only took eBooks with me on my iPad. I borrowed some from the library and others from Amazon with my Prime membership. I still don’t love eBooks, but I wanted to take just one small roller bag  and a shoulder bag for the week and I wasn’t sure about the weather so I packed what turned out to be too many clothes and shoes.

Before I left I had nearly finished a book a friend lent me, which I didn’t want to take on the trip since it wasn’t mine to lose or damage (and it turned out I had to gate check my bag on 3 of the 4 legs of the trip, so that was definitely a possibility).  I had posted on Facebook about attending a very interesting talk at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on one of their paintings, Piermatteo D’Amelia’s Annunciation. A friend saw my post and lent me his copy of The Chapel by Michael Downing. Quick aside: this lecture was the first in a new series at the museum called Close Up, where one item from the collection is temporarily displayed by itself in the special exhibit gallery, with accompanying programming that helps visitors learn more about it. I bought the Close Up guide written for Annunciation by Nathaniel Silver and it’s a wonderful little book. I’m looking forward to future Close Ups.

The Chapel features one of my favorite pieces in the Gardner, which one of the guards told me is also the oldest painting in the collection, Giotto’s The Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple. The book is about E., recent widow of a Harvard administrator named Mitchell, who is on a trip to Italy that her husband planned for them. He was working on a book about Dante, and part of the trip included a visit to the Scrovegni chapel in Padua, home to Giotto’s famous fresco cycle. One of the panels is the precursor to Giotto’s later painting of the presentation of Jesus, hence the connection to the Gardner. The chapel sounds fascinating and beautiful and I hope to visit it one day.

The novel The Chapel was a good read — it’s a book which tells a story and also sets out to examine “Big T” truths, about love and truth and art and loss and grief and belief and being human. E. doesn’t want to be on this trip, but once in Padua she meets T., who seems as lost as she is in some ways, and utterly competent in others, and she also meets a very kind woman named Shelby who is at home in her own soul. Between these encounters and several other minor ones, E. begins to feel her way towards herself again, and to see that she hasn’t been herself not since Mitchell died, but in decades. Readers are treated to gorgeous descriptions of art, food, and drink in Padua (I wanted an Aperol spritz badly as I read) and even more gorgeous discussions of Dante, Giotto, Scrovegni, and the world of art history, preservation, and criticism. I finished it this morning, and enjoyed it very much.

On the planes at the start of my trip I read most of an issue of The Nation. You should stop whatever you’re doing and read What’s Killing America’s Black Babies by Zoe Carpenter right now, and then spend the next weeks processing it. I still am. The article is about the causes of disproportionately high infant mortality rates among black babies — all of which derive from institutionalized racism. And about the heroic work of some people in Milwaukee, where the problem is worse than anywhere else in America, especially, as Carpenter explains, “. . .  Julia Means, a nurse with a striking track record with Milwaukee’s infants. By her own count, Means has worked with 360 families in the last 12 years, through a program called Blanket of Love. Every single baby whose parents came to her group meetings lived to its first birthday, she told me. Her method is to “wrap the pregnant woman up in love.” Read it. Digest it. Talk about it with someone. Or several someones.

I also read a “Kindle Single” by Andy Borowitz, which also appears to be a story on The Moth, An Unexpected Twist. It’s the story of a freak medical condition and a harrowing series of unfortunate events in the treatment/recovery of said condition, but really, it’s a love story. I’d recommend it, even if you usually feel squeamish or uninterested in medical stories.

My mom is really into HGTV and also I’ve been interested in Tiny Houses (and before that, Not So Big Houses) and more intentional owning of things for awhile, so I also borrowed Tiny House Living  by Ryan Mitchell in the Prime reading section of the Kindle store. I didn’t read every word — some of it is similar to other things I’ve read that discuss paring down your stuff, deciding what you value, living more lightly, etc. I enjoyed the stories of people who went Tiny and the pictures. It was good vacation reading. Inspiring.

And I read two novels that I checked out from the NH Downloadable Books. First, I got caught up with Maggie Hope, the heroine of Susan Elia MacNeal‘s series about a young American woman working for Britain’s government during WWII. As I wrote in my last Book Bingo post I figured out I’d missed The Prime Minister’s Secret Agent. I wrestled with some historical liberties MacNeal takes in this outing in the service of her story, but I read through to the end and the author’s note I see why she did it. Still, I prefer the parts about Maggie, her work, and her friendships more than the historical speculation.

Finally, I read My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman, the Swedish author who also wrote A Man Called Ove. I finished this evening, and I really liked it. It’s about Elsa and eight year old who is very smart and also very miserable at school because she’s different, and her formidable granny, who encourages her to fight back against bullies with the exhortation, “kick them in the fusebox.” Granny has told Elsa fairytales all her life, and as her last act, she sends Elsa on a quest to deliver a series of letters. Hence the title. Elsa is amazing, and felt very true to me, smart and precocious but still very much an eight year old girl. That’s hard to write. If the story seems unlikely, well, the other characters in the book are very well formed and I thought it was a good read. Some might call it a tear jerker, perhaps, but as the story unfolds readers understand why this cast of characters were all in Granny’s life, and it seems if slightly improbable at least not so contrived. And I think a book that examines bullies and the bullied, difference, imperfection, and above all the long lasting damage that human violence — physical, psychological, and emotional — causes has a right to evoke some tears.

I’m starting a graduate course tomorrow so I don’t know how much time I’ll have to read. I can take classes at the university where I’m a librarian, and I’ve been there almost a year now, so I figured, why not? it’s on Adolescent Development. Hopefully I won’t learn all the things I did wrong parenting Teens the Elder & Younger. Stay tuned!

 

 

 

 

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