The Great Memorial Weekend Read
May 8, 2011

Memorial Day weekend is fast approaching. Most of us will enjoy a combination of activities on this first holiday weekend of the summer, and I hope those will include at least a thought for the real meaning of the day. Regardless of how we feel about war and those who declare it, the people who actually are in the day-to-day interactions in the field deserve respect. The people who have returned home deserve our help as well as our respect.  And the people who died deserve our attention and honor. It’s taken me a while to learn that paying tribute to those who gave more that I have ever given is no dishonor to my own political beliefs. I am grateful for both the sacrifices made by these admirable people and for the acquired wisdom that allows me to understand that.

My other plans for the weekend include a barbecue with friends, a half-day of swap meet and antique store browsing, some special meals, and lots of reading on my porch while enjoying the changing colors of the mountains.

In the past, I have selected an overabundance of books, more than I could possibly read so that if one didn’t look good I could simply toss it aside for another. This year, however, I have decided to commit to three books, meaning I have chosen ones I know I want to read. And will read. They are, in no particular order, Résistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France by Agnès Humbert, a book unknown to me that I discovered several years ago while browsing the shelves at my local independent bookstore; All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West; and The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay, the latter two sent to me by a good friend. I selected them purely on instinct. Why my eyes passed over numerous others and stopped on these I could not say for sure. But I had no doubt these were the books even as my fingers were wedging them out from between their neighbors. Résistance is a war memoir of a woman who aided the Allied effort and paid a serious price for it. All Passion Spent is another woman’s story, fictional but addressing issues of people’s, especially, women’s, control of their own lives, a subject about which the author was greatly concerned. The Towers of Trebizond is another novel, albeit an autobiographical one, about a group of people traveling from Istanbul to Trebizond. What’s unusual about my choices is that my beloved nonfiction is outweighed by fiction, two to one. It’s not that I don’t read fiction, but it is less common and almost never will it have been published after the mid-twentieth century, often earlier. The latter books was published to great acclaim in 1956, so it’s not far off the mark. It will be interesting to watch for my own reaction to the weekend selections.

My menus are not yet complete, but I know that each day will begin with Çilbir, a Turkish a dish of poached eggs on a bed of garlic-flavored yogurt. Throughout the days I will be sipping my version of my absolutely favorite cold soup, Gazpacho. Dinner on Friday night will consist of crab cakes, a shrimp/lemon peel/cucumber salad, a chilled artichoke, and champagne. For other meals I plan to have plenty of a summer fruit salad, my favorite green salad, cold baked chicken, and roasted turkey breast for sandwiches. Dessert will be my new favorite version of “ice cream”: plain Greek yogurt mixed with frozen blueberries and vanilla-flavored sugar until the berries thaw and the now-sweet yogurt turns a lovely bluish-pink color. (I may even freeze some into popsicles.) The barbecue will probably feature grilled steaks, corn on the cob, and a cold vegetable salad with watermelon for dessert. It sounds like a lot of work, but it won’t be. A couple things I will buy pre-made, but most will be put together before the weekend so eating is simply a matter is putting the book down, setting the patio table, opening the refrigerator door, and assembling the parts on plates.

Upcoming Book Festivals:
There’s only one, but if you love science fiction, it’s a goodie!

Location: Madison, Wisconsin
Festival: Wiscon
Date: May 26-30
There are quite a few science fiction conventions and gatherings, but Wiscon is the first one that “encourages discussion, debate and extrapolation of ideas relating to feminism, gender, race and class.” It began in 1977 with a small gathering of mostly university students, but now in its 35th year it attracts hundreds from all over the world. There are various program tracks that encompass more than 100 panel discussions, readings, demonstrations, lectures, and more. Children and teens will have their own programs with specially-designed age-appropriate activities. For children that means craft activities, supervised swimming, story-telling and games, and some discussion groups and interaction with the teens. For teens, there is a separate room that is off-limits to children and adults with more complicated activities, puzzles, gaming, videos, music, and video games. For adults, special events include the Room of One’s Own Reception; the Gathering; Opening Ceremonies; Dessert Salon, Awards & Speeches; the Signout; and Dead Dog Party. Cost for adults is $50, and for teens and children $20. (Childcare is available but the deadline for registering has passed.)

The Pub House:
Lookout, the literary book imprint from the University of North Carolina’s Dept. of Creative Writing focuses on “emerging and historically underrepresented voices, as well as works by established writers overlooked by commercial houses,” calling itself a “haven for books that matter.” What’s particularly unusual is that they do not select manuscripts from a submissions pile, but instead solicit them from the pool of writers who have previously published in their literary magazine, Ecotone. It is an unusual approach but their first two books have received excellent reviews in major publications.

Two collection of short stories fill their first issue. Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman is a collection of short stories, some from previous collections, some new, covering four decades and places around the world. One reviewer noted that despite the disparity of the stories that range widely—an unforeseen love affair between adolescent cousins, a lifetime of memories unearthed by an elderly couple’s decision to shoplift, the deathbed secret of a young girl’s forbidden forest tryst with the tsar, the danger that befalls a wealthy couple’s child in a European inn of misfits—“themes recur; narratives speak to one another—the effect is not so much of a sampling as of a suite.” God Bless America is a collection of thirteen short stories by Steve Almond that explores America’s torn soul, its suffering, injustices, yet still manages to infuse them with “possibilities for redemption.” His writing is both comic and sad: a hapless would-be actor, desperate to escape the drudgery of his existence, lands the role of a lifetime; a psychoanalyst with a secret gambling addiction squares off over the poker table against a damaged ex-patient; a young woman becomes the target of a traumatized soldier’s misguided hopes for love; a grief-stricken refugee who tends the graves of a forgotten cemetery, only to have his fragile peace shattered by an unwelcome visitor.

Lookout is committed to quality; it will publish only two or three titles each year, rotating between fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Imaging Books & Reading:
Be prepared; this is the largest indoor photo in the world (as of March 2011) and it’s of the Strahov Library in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Watching it can make you dizzy, but it’s worth it. What you will see is a single image composed of 3,000 individual photographs made using a 70-200mm f/2.8 canon L lens and  stitched together. For design fans, that’s 280,000 pixels by 140,000 pixels. For all others, this image would, if printed, total 78 feet by 39 feet.

Of Interest:
“I used to be the kind of reader who gives short shrift to long novels. I used to take a wan pleasure in telling friends who had returned from a tour of duty with War and Peace or The Man Without Qualities with that I’ve-seen-some-things look in their eyes—the thousand-page stare—that they had been wasting their time. In the months it had taken them to plough through one book by some logorrheic modernist or world-encircling Russian, I had read a good eight to ten volumes of svelter dimensions,” wrote Mark OConnell in a wonderful essay titled “The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels.”

Until next week, read well, read often and read on!

Lauren