I started reading the US in three books per state in January of 2014, nearly three years ago. I just finished reading Kansas, the 17th of 51 states (and the District of Columbia).
This is going to take a while.
Tag: Books
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I spent this weekend devouring a novel. I can’t remember the last time I started a book on a Friday and finished it on a Sunday. It made me so happy to feast on fiction again!
After being let down by a book I had been excited to read, I went into this one with little hope. I allowed myself a little bit of excitement about the hay bale on the cover, and cautious optimism for stories of farm land and farm life. I had no expectation that this book would grip me, and the thought never crossed my mind that I would pick it up and not want to put it down until I finished it. I took time this weekend to tape off the baseboards in our living room, to go to the grocery, to bake hamburger buns, and to make chocolate covered strawberries with our daughter. Aside from those things, I read.
And it felt amazing.
I don’t want to build the book up, lest it might let someone down. The main point is that this book thrilled me, and it felt really good to be thrilled by a book again. It’s been a long time. Even with that caveat, I’m guessing you’ll want to know what book it was :-). It was Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres.
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Work that taps into our humanity.
Routine work can be outsourced or automated; artistic, empathic, nonroutine work generally cannot.
— from Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
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I am super excited. I’m about to start on an entirely new and foreign-to-me part of the country on my Andrea Reads America reading project: Idaho. What I’m most giddy about is that there is an author I’ve been hearing about for years — on book podcasts and in my book-nerd circles — and I’ve been waiting to get to Idaho so I can finally read her. The author? Marilynne Robinson.
Robinson is probably best known for Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, but Gilead is set in Iowa and I haven’t gotten to Iowa yet. Instead, I’ll be reading Housekeeping, which is set on a glacial lake in Idaho, Robinson’s home state. Like Gilead, Housekeeping glitters with awards and nominations, including nominations for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.
I’m dying to download Housekeeping, which is apparently set on a glacial lake and is a dark and intense read. I know nothing about Idaho, and even less about glacial lakes in Idaho, and so I’m eager to not only read a (hopefully) phenomenal book, but a (hopefully) phenomenal book set in a harsh, unknown-to-me climate.
I’m dying to download the book, but I’m refraining. I’m delaying gratification until I’ve finished my write-up for the Hawaii books I read. I’ve been sitting on these Hawaii notes for months, and it is time to compile and post them. Housekeeping — and Idaho — will be my reward for publishing, and for finally getting back on track with Andrea Reads America. I can’t wait!
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I suppose I should write about warm wooden tables and dark interiors, walls lined with heavy shelves that stretch from floor to ceiling, cozy nooks to hide and read in, quiet, peace, the endless options for learning or for escaping into a fictitious world.
I do love all those things about libraries. These new modern libraries with shiny white walls, giant atriums, minimalist archictecture and bright Ikea-inspired decor — they don’t speak to me. They don’t make me want to stay and cozy up. They feel cold and sterile, and they are noisy. I want warmth and muffled sound from a library.
But that’s not really what I want to write about. Library means something different to me now. Library doesn’t mean a place I drive to so that I can browse and check out books. Library means the suite of books stored on my nook. It means lightweight, easy to hold, no-car-needed access to any literature I could ever want. It means instant gratification when I finish a book and don’t yet have another. It means nonfiction during the day and fiction at night, without having to carry more than one book. It means I can carry Lonesome Dove and Gone With the Wind, and Pillars of the Earth, and they weigh ounces instead of pounds. It means readable without having to turn a light on, so I can read in bed without keeping my husband up.
To me, library now means portable. Library means the collection of books I carry in my purse.
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I loved the Little House on the Prairie books when I was growing up. I don’t know what the draw to them was, but it was strong. The family unit was intimate, and life was hard but wholesome, simple, and earthy. I loved how real everything was, and how memorable: a piece of candy on Christmas was spectacularly special: it came only once a year and there was no sense of, “Whaaaat? Only an orange and a peppermint stick in my stocking?” Kids in my life get those things every day.
But also there was the prairie in those books. Like Lonesome Dovelater, and O Pioneers!, and any other novel filled with sweeping vistas of golden wheat, or sweet heather, warm and grass-smelling in the sun, the prairie was a place I always fantasized about and romanticized. It represents the wild frontier, the families rough and raw and strong, who planted themselves on land that went on forever without trees or wind break, just flat open land covered in a sea of grass, grassland as far as you can see, and they planted themselves in it and wintered in the bitter cold of winters in sod houses or hand-built log cabins that wind and snow whistled through the cracks of. Winters that I could barely stand in a modern house with solid, double, insulated walls, and plastic-sealed windows.
There were grasshoppers in Little House — a plague of them — and glass windows were an extravagance. There were sod floors and people lived close to the earth, working the land, appreciating every small thing it provided. And they made their own clothes and pies and furniture, and Pa played the fiddle, and they read the Bible.
So when we moved to Minnesota, I wanted to visit the prairie. It was a mythical place to me, wholly unlike the coastal seascape of my childhood. And it was everything I imagined it to be, only better because I could smell it. It smelled of warm grass and wind, of sunshine and dirt, and of ozone as we watched the lightning storm and its black bulk crawl over the vast grassland toward our campsite.
For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Trying to get back into the writing habit.
Butterfly Mind 