Tag: alaska

January ’13 was…

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When I look back on January 2013 I have a sense of relief. All things considered this month was better than the last. In the grand scheme of things January treated me kind. No major meltdowns. No minor catastrophes to speak of. I started training for Just ‘Cause in the quiet way. Four to five miles a day and I didn’t stress about the numbers. If I didn’t make five or even four I didn’t have a hissy fit or beat myself or moi up. I cut me & myself some slack; gave us a break. I know that as the months wear on this won’t always be the case, but for now it was nice to go easy on me, myself & moi. The running was a different matter. Just as relaxed a schedule but not so easy going on. The run is a little over six weeks away and I’ve done next to nil in order to train. New Guinea has been awesome in that I’m working on speed intervals on level five. Let me repeat that. Level five. Nothing to write home about. I used to operate at level nine. Enough said. On with the books! I am pretty proud of the list.

  • Lives of the Painters, Architects and Sculptors by Giorgio Vasari ~ in honor of National Art Month way back in October. This finally completes the series!
  • Ancient Athens on 5 Drachmas a Day by Philip Matyszak ~ in honor of Female Domination Day in Greece.
  • Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray ~ in honor of January being the first month I read something from the first chapter of a Lust book. I admit I didn’t finish this one.
  • Of Human Bondage by William Somerset Maugham ~ in honor of Maugham’s birth month. I also didn’t finish this one.
  • Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron ~ Happy new year. Read something to make me happy.
  • Idle Days in Patagonia by W. H. Hudson ~ in honor of January being the best time to visit Patagonia.
  • The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll ~ in honor of Lewis birth and death month.
  • Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson ~ in honor of the month all Creatures Great and Small aired.
  • Tatiana by Dorothy Jones ~ in honor of January being the month Alaska became a state.

On audio I listened to:

  • Final Solution by Michael Chabon ~ in honor of January being Adopt a Rescued Bird month.
  • No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith ~ in honor of Female Mystery Month
  • City of Thieves by David Benioff ~ last minute add-on. This was addicting!

For the Early Review program with LibraryThing:

  • Gold Coast Madam by Rose Laws (started in Dec)
  • Her by Christa Parravani

For Fun:

  • Leave Your Sleep the poetry book for children by Natalie Merchant

Tatiana

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Jones, Dorothy. Tatiana. Fairbanks: Vanessapress, 2001.

Tatiana is an Aleut woman clinging to her ancestral truths in spite the while man’s emergence and the prevalence of modern medicine, technology and unfamiliar customs. This is first apparent when her husband needs surgery after a burst appendix. She is grateful for modern healthcare saving his life but is somewhat disappointed when the old remedies of her culture couldn’t do the same. This sociological shift is even more evident in the upbringing of her children. Her daughter’s mouth is washed out with soap for not speaking English in class; her son, home from a higher education school in Oregon, is bored with the tiny town life that used to thrill him. The divide even affects Tatiana personally when her aacha (friend with whom she has a special bond) Katya is baptized by the missionaries, marries a white man and is ruined by him. It is this relationship that is interlaced throughout Tatiana’s present day life. It is one of Tatiana’s deepest sorrows. But, nothing drives home the differences between Tatiana’s old way of life and the modern more than World War II. Evacuated to a southern Alaskan village Tatiana’s entire way of life is disrupted and turned upside down.

This was chock full of lines that I connected with immediately.  I can’t quote them all but here are a few: “His hands talk more than his mouth” (p 5), and “Some will stronger than mine soaked my soul in that fear” (p 7). Here is another, “Fear made me mean” (p 80). Does anyone else think of Yoda reading that?

There was only one moment in the book that disappointed me. On page 239, the day before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Tatiana says of her son’s soldier friend Lawrence, “I never did see Lawrence…again” and yet four months later, “Lawrence, Paulie’s soldier friend, rushed into the house. Must have been that other soldier friend named Lawrence.

Reason read: Alaska formally became a state in the month of January.

Author fact: Tatiana is Dorothy Jones’s first book.

Book trivia: Not many libraries have this book. In fact, no library in my immediate area of even my whole state had it. My copy was borrowed from Colorado. Thanks, ‘Rado! However, I have to add this small disappointment – my interlibrary loan came with lots of paperwork taped to the front with the strict words, “Do not remove.” I am dying to see the art work for the cover (by Sara Tabbert). I took a peek at Sara’s website and now I’m even more disappointed I can’t see the cover art. Maybe if I tear a little corner….

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Alaska” (p 17). There’s a no brainer!

Jan ’13 is…

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Holy crap I am late with the list. “I’m late, I’m late” said the White Rabbit! Okay, okay! I just finished The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland so sue me.
January 2013 is another year of hope and of promise. Kisa and I are going to see Trey Anastasio at the Palace in a few weeks. I officially started training for the 5th Just ‘Cause Walk and, and. And! I am training to run a 10k in March. Yay me. But, here are the books…before I get too carried away.

  • Rabbit Hill (speaking of rabbits) by Robert Lawson in honor of when All Creatures Great & Small first aired. Get it? Creatures = rabbits. This is a kids book so I’m hoping to fly through it.
  • The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith in honor of January being Female Mystery month. I’m listening to this on cd. It’s the first one in the series so expect to see Alexander McCall Smith on my book list for the next 4 or 5 months.
  • Lives of the Painters, Sculptors Vol 4 by Giorgio Vasari ~ this (finally, finally) ends the series started in October in honor of Art Appreciation month
  • Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackery ~ in honor of the first month of the year I’m reading something from the first chapter of More Book Lust.
  • Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron ~ in honor of the a Happy New Year. Another kids book to lighten the mood.
  • Ancient Athens on 5 Drachmas a Day by Philip Matyszak ~ Okay, get this – Female Domination Day in Greece happens in January, hence reading something Greek.
  • Tatiana by Dorothy M. Jones ~ in honor of Alaska becoming a state in January. Mo one locally has this book in their library so I had to ILL it. It might have to come from Alaska. How fitting.
  • Final Solution by Michael Chabon ~ in honor of January being Adopt a Rescued Bird month. This is another book I will listen to in the car or while working out.

For the LibraryThing Early Review program I am just finishing up Gold Coast Madam by Rose Laws. I also received notification of a January Early Review book but as always I won’t mention it by title until it’s in my hot little hands (or in this case, cold little hands since it’s 6 degrees outside).

January 2011 Was…

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I can’t help but sing ‘Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow” when I think of the month January has been. If you live in any state (besides Hawaii) you know what I am talking about. Even HotTopic-Lanta has gotten some snowfall. They haven’t known what to do with it, but they got it nonetheless! Needless to say the snow has kept me indoors and reading for the month of January! For the record, here are the books:

  • Breath, Eyes Memory by Edwidge Danticat ~ in honor of Danticat’s birth month. This was a movie in my head (or else a true-life story). Really, really good!
  • Cruddy by Lynda Barry ~ in honor of Barry’s birth month. This was one of the most disturbing books I have read so far. the violence and abuse was over the top.
  • King of the World by David Remnick ~ in honor of Muhammad Ali’s birth month. I didn’t know I wanted to know but I’m glad I know.
  • I, Robot by Isaac Asimov ~ in honor of Asimov’s birth month. Science fiction, of course. Interesting, but a little redundant in theme.
  • Two in the Far North by Margaret Murie ~ in honor of Alaska becoming a state in the month of January. Courage and adventure personified. I enjoyed this book a lot.
  • Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army From the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 -May 7, 1945 by Stephen Ambrose ~ in honor of Ambrose’s birth month. It took me a little to get into this book but I’m glad I read it. It is slowly helping me get over my fear of Hitler and all things Nazi.
  • Another Song About the King by Kathryn Stern ~ in honor of Elvis Presley’s birth month being in January. This was a super fast, super fun read.

I was supposed to get an Early Review book but it hasn’t arrived yet. It will go on the February list of books, hopefully.

Two in the Far North

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Murie, Margaret E. Two in the Far North. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.

Murie starts her first book, Two in the Far North with a look back at her first visit to Alaska when she was nine years old in the year 1911. The writing is full of exuberance and excitement. Her enthusiasm oozes from the pages and offers a unique perspective on the birth of an Alaskan frontier town from a child’s point of view. As she grows into an adult and returns from college the emphasis shifts to marriage (1924) and following her biologist husband as he does field research in the untamed parts of her beloved Alaska. On each expedition you can tell she never loses that joy from exploring everything that makes Alaska unique. (I can’t even tell you how many times she uses the word ‘happy’ to describe everyone and everything around her.) Murie’s chronicle of life in the Alaskan wilderness is honest and passionate from start to finish.

Favorite lines, “There was one wonderful spring when people had to move out of  their houses on Front Street, and rowboats were the thing, but this was fun only for the children” (p 54), “A rocking chair and a bed with springs are to be enjoyed whenever met” (p 210), and “If man does not destroy himself through his idolatry of the machine, he may learn one day tp step gently on his earth” (p 357).

Favorite Murie illustrations: p 167, p 195, and p201.

Author Fact: Margaret Murie had so many interesting facts about her I couldn’t chose just one. For starters, she lived to be 101! She studied at Simmons College in Boston for a short time (one year). There is a movie about her life called “Arctic Dance.”

Book Trivia: Two in the Far North is Murie’s first book and it is illustrated by her husband, Olaus.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called “Alaska” (p 17). Duh.

June (2009) was…

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June was an amazingly quiet yet unsettling month. I think I needed it –  all of it. I know I wanted it – depression and all. Lots and lots of reading married with work on the house (we started painting!), a lot of work at work, a little music (Rebecca’s cd release party was fun, fun, fun! Can’t wait for the Iron Horse next month!), a small charity walk (Hike for Mike, which I still need to write about)…June was mostly about staying hermitage.
Here are the books:

  • Slow Dancing on Dinosaur Bones by Lana Witt ~ an interesting book about small town life.
  • And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts ~ the most amazing journalism on the AIDS epidemic
  • Don’t Look Back by Karin Fossum ~ a murder thriller set in Norway
  • Before the Deluge by Deidre Chethem ~ a nonfiction about the Yangtze river
  • Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance by Richard Powers ~ three stories centered around a photograph.
  • A Bigamist’s Daughter by Alice McDermott ~ In honor of Alice’s birth month…a story about how things aren’t always what they seem.
  • The Cat Who Saw Red by Lilian Jackson Braun ~ In honor of National Cat Month…okay, so the cats don’t solve the mystery, but they are funny!
  • The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan ~ in honor of McEwan’s birth month (childrens book)
  • The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan~ In honor of McEwan’s birth month (adult – verrry adult book)!
  • This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff~ in honor of National Writing Month (families). I’ll be reading Tobias’s brother’s memoir next June.
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain ~ I had forgotten how great this classic is!
  • Lving High: an Unconventional Autobiography by June Burn ~ Homesteading on an island off Puget Sound.

For the Early Review Program:

  • Beyond Road’s End: Living Free in Alaska by Janice Schofield Eaton ~ a memoir abotu running away to Alaska.

For the fun of it:

  • The Morning Star in Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine is Illuminated by Nick Bantock. Everyone knows I love Nick Bantock. His books are sensual and fascinating. I am drawn to them all the time.

Beyond Road’s End

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Eaton, Janice Schofield. Beyond Road’s End: Living Free in Alaska. Anchorage: Alaska Northwest Books, 2009.

Beyond Road’s End accomplished a great deal for me. For one, it was a tool of teaching: I learned a great deal about Alaska’s environment, both culturally and ecologically. Eaton’s straightforward, folksy narrative made the didactic chapters blend with the personal ones smoothly. It was interesting to see how her work with herbal remedies began as a curiosity and then grew into a viable career. Simultaneously, her personal life took the same course. Coming to Alaska from New England opened her eyes to a different way of living, a different way of being.
Another Alaskan trait I learned about from reading Eaton’s book was the native people’s generosity. Every neighbor had a story to tell, a meal to share, and a door they kept open to strangers. Many times throughout Beyond Road’s End there was someone there just in the nick of time either with shelter, food, or a helping hand. This giving attitude convinced Eaton to keep her cabin open to strangers while she and partner Ed were away for long periods of time.
The one complaint I had was the absence of dates. There was nothing to ground me chronologically until the Exxon Valdez oil spill. I found myself questioning little details like how long after leaving her husband did she take on the adventure of Alaska? Did this story start in the 1970s? Early ’80s? I found myself distracted by wondering.

Here are the quotes I hope are kept: “There are so many retirement options other than death by television” (p 81).
“Knocking meant you were strangers” (p 113).
“With each surge, king crude conquers territory” (p 350).

Another thing I hope they keep is the series of photos. They were great!

Living High

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Burn, June. Living High: an Unconventional Autobiography. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941.

I like books that make me ask questions. I like books that leave me wanting more. Not more of the story. Usually, the ending is adequate enough and I don’t need to know more about that. I am left wanting to know more about the author, about the life of the author at that time. Such was the case with June Burn. When I read Living High I held in my hands a first edition copy signed by June herself. Maddeningly, there were no pictures to guide my imagination. How old was she when she finished Living High? Where were her parents? What did she looked like? I pictured a fiery redhead with an unmatchable zest for life. But, I wanted the truth of who she was.

Living High is called an “Unconventional Autobiography” and I would have to agree. Not because it doesn’t cover a life from the sunrise of birth to the sunset of death, but because it has a moral to the story. There is a lesson to be learned within Living High’s pages and that lesson is live life to the fullest. Enjoy every single moment of each and every day. June is elegant and adventurous when describing living on the gumdrop island of Sentinel off Puget Sound with her husband, Farrar; or remembering walrus hunting and dogsledding in Alaska; or later, bombing around the west coast in the Burn’s Ballad Bungalow with Farrar and two kids (named North and South, I kid you not).

Best quotes: “Be thrifty with the things that count and you won’t have time to worry about whether your wallet is fullor not” (p 7), “To go on an island and pull the ladder up after us and live, untroubled by anything – that would be heaven” (p 11), and “the wind came howling out of the north, with icicles in its whiskers” (p 150). My favorite is, “When you walk you are somewhere at every step” (p 264).

Interesting side note: June changed her name and so did her second son, South. One day he decided he was Bobby or Bob.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “Living High in Cascadia” (p 149). Go figure.

The Letters (with rants)

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Rice, Luanne and Joseph Monninger. The Letters. New York: Bantam, 2008.

Not on any Challenge list. Not a must read from a friend. Not a gift. Not an Early Review book from LibraryThing. Not even something I would ordinarily pick up on my own. Nope. I read The Letters simply because part of it takes place on Monhegan Island. There I said it. I’m a sucker for my island. Put it in print and you have a loyal reader. Such is the case of The Letters.

It’s a creative concept for a storyline: two parents torn apart by the accidental death of their son. The father (Sam) is obsessed with seeing the place where his son (Paul) perished. Driven by that obsession he makes a pilgrimage into the Alaskan wild where his son’s plane crashed. The mother (Hadley) artistic and alcoholic, find herself in equal solitude on Monhegan Island, a tiny (586 acre) island off the coast of Maine that really does exist. These parents are as far away from each other physically as their marriage is spiritually.  Their story consists of letters written on the brink of divorce – volleying blame back and forth. Through these letters, not only does the anguish of losing Paul wring itself out, but histories are revealed. Grief is only a fraction of the bigger picture.

Being a one-time Monheganer I enjoyed Hadley’s letters from the island. I often seek solace on its rocky coastline ten miles out to sea. Her description of Cathedral Woods was dead on. I was disappointed she couldn’t stay 100% true to factual details, though. To my knowledge the island has never been home to squirrels or raccoons and the deer population was annihilated (for lack of a better word) in 1999. I suppose Rice and Monninger to beef up the animal population of the island for added charm. Or something. But, my biggest disappointment came when Hadley fell on the rocks. I don’t think I will be ruining the plot by revealing this, but Monhegan doesn’t have a clinic that someone can just pop into to get ace bandages, ice packs or even aspirin. The island operates on a beautifully orchestrated volunteer system. It’s not as formalized as it used to be thanks to a lack of funding, but when someone is hurt or falls ill on Monhegan there is an urgency felt by everyone. The entire community will band together to bring a fallen tourist, a mid-seizure epileptic, the about-to-give-birth pregnant woman, to safety. I feel Rice and Monninger missed an opportunity to emphasize how similar Sam and Hadley’s rural landscapes really are, despite being at opposite ends of the country. They both fall ill and while their ailments are different the lack of convenient treatment is the same.

Lines that said something: “I hated the drinking because it erased the woman that I loved” (p 35).
“It’s when you start preferring email with a man five miles away to talking to your husband that you know you have a problem” (p 54).
“It shrieks when its not howling” (p56). Talking about Monhegan wind. Amen to that.

The Cage

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Schulman, Audrey. The Cage. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1994.Cage

As soon as I saw this book I knew I would read it in one day. The Cage is only 228 pages long. The storyline is simple. Beryl is a young photographer, known for her moving portraits of animals. She is recruited for an assignment in Manitoba to take stills of polar bears in their natural habitat. The catch is the assignment involves working with three other men and a cage barely big enough to contain her. Nothing will stand between her and the bears except for the much anticipated cage. When the cage didn’t make it’s debut in the story until p.150 and it was afforded a few pages of description (Beryl sits in it only twice), I knew the Cage was a metaphor for something bigger: Beryl’s life. She is confined by her insecurities, her rigid sense of self. She is uncomfortable with relationships and intimacy, constantly jittery and unsure. “She sometimes wished she had ears like a cat so she could fold them back as cats do then people pushed their faces in too close” (p. 45).
Beryl and her crew spend some time in Churchill before going out on the expedition. There, Beryl befriends a local and spends some time bear watching at the local dump. It reminded me of an episode of Northern Exposure when Ed & his date go to the dump to watch the bear forage for food.
Needless to say, the expedition ends with death. Beryl even speaks of the impending doom as a premonition the night before. I was shocked by the tragedy even though I knew it was coming. It was a given someone had to (and would) die by bear. It’s like the proverbial gun in the first act, by the third act it needs to go off. Schulman did a great job leaving the story open. Ultimately, I was unsure exactly who survives. I closed the book wondering what Beryl was going to do next. Just the way I like a book to end.

BookLust Twist: This selection comes from Book Lust’s “Adventure By the Book: Fiction” chapter (p. 7).