So Little to Share

Image by Jon Tyson @jontyson

So little to share, so much time . . .

Strike that, reverse it.

(Fans of the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with Gene Wilder, will recognize a version of that quote. If you don’t recognize it, well, hie thee to a streaming service and watch the movie. Better yet, read the book.)

Image by Zach Ramelan @zachramelon

My wish for you today:

May your time be your own.

At least until

after that first cup of coffee or tea.

For this newsletter, I want to keep my promise to focus on book reviews and recommendations.
Because there’s nothing quite as wonderful as curling up with a good book
(as demonstrated
by our in-house model, here)!

I just finished Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr (Scribner 2021).

I’m glad I got a heads-up from our bookstore – shout out to Lopez Bookshop! – that it’s a little confusing at first, and I’m oh so glad I persevered, because:

I. LOVE. THIS. BOOK.

Seemingly disparate stories are connected by a mostly illegible ancient manuscript about a man who seeks a city in the clouds and becomes, along the way, a donkey, a fish, and a crow. The characters who interact with the story in the manuscript include a girl living in the future after ecological apocalypse; a boy in the fifteenth century who suffers from prejudices related to his poverty and his cleft lip, and a resourceful girl living in the same era but on the opposite side of a war into which the boy has been conscripted; a disaffected teen who mourns the loss of wildlife to accommodate tourists in a tiny town in modern-day Idaho; and a man who, orphaned at a young age and misunderstood by everyone except the local librarians, is in love with a man he may never see again.

The marvel of this book is that each of the wildly different characters and their wildly different settings is completely credible. Some writers excel at creating sci-fi or fantasy landscapes, some craft beautiful historical fiction, or romance, or coming-of-age stories for young adults. Doerr does it all, in a single book, and made me love and care about every one of the characters.

While I was reading it, I made excuses to go to bed early so I could get back to the book, and when it was over, I heaved a bittersweet sigh because the ending was oh so satisfying but still, sadly, an end.

Favorite Quotes from Cloud Cuckoo Land

“Repository. You know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”

***

Seymore feels like he used to . . . as though he’s being allowed to glimpse an older and undiluted world, when every barn swallow, every sunset, every storm, pulsed with meaning.

By age seventeen he’d convinced himself that every human was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption. But . . . [then] he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

(Believe it or not, the photo was taken by my phone, from Watmough Bay.)

In other news . . .

For friends in the Pacific Northwest, the book launch party is coming up! Friday, May 17, 2024, 5:30 – 8:00 pm, at the Lopez Island Library. Bring an egg-dish to the potluck and join the fun!

If you can’t make it to the book launch, join me at the Griffin Bay Bookstore in Friday Harbor on Sunday, May 26, at 2:00. We’re thinking of making a party out of that, too! We’ll either sail over together, or caravan on the ferry, and spend the day in Friday Harbor having brunch, shopping, maybe even take in an evening movie. Email me if you’re interested in taking the trip with us sharilaneauthor@gmail.com.

And on Thursday, July 25, 2024, at 6:30 pm I’ll be at Roundabout Books in Bend, Oregon. Roundabout Books has a unique policy (which I applaud): entry is a $5 ticket or purchase of a book. It doesn’t have to be my book, by the way! The goal is to support independent bookstores, and I can definitely get behind that.

More information about these and other events can be found on the home page of the website www.sharilane.com

Last but not least, another novel I wrote, Jaysus, MooMoo, and the Immortal Woos, was longlisted in the international Stockholm Writers Festival First Five Pages contest. I am truly walking on sunshine…

Sunshine and wildflowers at Iceberg Point

Ode to Curmudgeons

Portrait of Walt Whitman
On the cover of The Illustrated American, April 19, 1890

Why do we love curmudgeons so?

Cantankerous characters are sprinkled liberally throughout literature. Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Ove in A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman (Atria Books 2015), Ernest in Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson (Random House 2011).

 . . . the two old Muppets who sit in the balcony and heckle everyone . . .

. . . the grieving old man in the movie Up . . .

 . . . Winston Churchill. Who can forget this famous exchange?

Bessie Braddock MP: “Winston, you are drunk, and what’s more
you are disgustingly drunk.”

Churchill: “Bessie, my dear, you are ugly, and what’s more, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly.”

 As an aside, there is much to dislike about this, including, of course, the fact that the ultimate diss on a woman is (assumed to be) insulting her looks. That certainly didn’t start with Churchill and, alas, continues still.

The thing is, curmudgeonly quips and sarcasm can be wickedly amusing to hear or see or read about.

Living with them? Not so much.

I have a theory about curmudgeons. I think we admire them, in literature and in real life, because they say what we polite and sensitive folks are too . . . polite and sensitive to say.

When a neighbor invites herself in for coffee and all you want is to be left alone in your smelly sweatpants so you can finish off the package of Lorna Doone’s, the curmudgeon will shut the door, irritably, on the neighbor, with or without a growled, “I’m busy.”

But you will say Oh of course, come in, let me make another pot of coffee, I’m not doing anything right now.

Because you are a kind person who really doesn’t want to hurt your neighbor’s feelings.

An extremely unscientific poll reveals that the surly cook is most readers’ favorite Two Over Easy All Day Long character. Walt, who grows shallots in his garden and sneaks them into the diner, and writes poetry on the side. Walt, who is almost uniformly rude and irritable and announces to all and sundry: “I’m Walt and I don’t like chitchat.”

So why do readers like him? Is it because he dispenses with social niceties when talking to Tony, the wealthy company president who’s had enough social niceties to last several lifetimes but a dearth of opportunities to practice actually being nice?

Possibly.

I think another reason may be the idea, possibly mythical, that every curmudgeonly exterior hides a soft heart, the fuzzy underbelly of the porcupine.

Like many writers, I don’t so much create characters as transcribe them onto the page. They saunter or creep or march into my consciousness and instruct me, imperiously, “Take this down, scribe,” or whisper plaintively, hopefully, “Would you, perhaps, be willing to tell my tale?”

Walt’s spirit was complex from the outset, and I have tried to be faithful to that. He is kind to Nareen, probably recognizing her as a kindred spirit, and to Nancy, who is already carrying weight of the world in her “VW Bug of hearts.” So it’s not so much that he reveals a hidden softness as that he is a complicated man, sometimes practically heroic in his generosity of spirit, other times only and exactly what Nancy calls him: a cranky old fart.

Maybe we love curmudgeons because they give us grace for the moments we cannot muster the strength to be kind. And because, like you and me and everyone else I know, they are occasionally inspired by their better angels, but mostly they’re just muddling through.

A Good Book

On Reading and Writing and Pigs in Heaven

I’d like to talk to you about
Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven.

Yes, this is my brand new blog/newsletter on my brand new website launched to support my brand new book, Two Over Easy All Day Long.

But I’ll have plenty of time to talk about that in the coming months, maybe even (if I’m lucky) in the coming years.

I hope so.

For now, I just want to rave about one of my all-time favorite books, by one of my all-time favorite authors.

The quotes below, from Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven, encapsulate beautifully what is possible in a good book.

___________________________________________

Background: Annawake Fourkiller, a newly-minted lawyer, is trying to explain to her boss, Franklin, why she believes the Cherokee child Turtle should be returned to her people, even though Turtle’s white adoptive mother is the only family Turtle knows. Annawake describes how important a sense of belonging is.

“People thought my life was so bleak . . . But I dreamed about the water . . . . All those perch down there you could catch, any time, you know? A world of free breakfast to help get you into another day. I’ve never been without that, have you?”

“No,” he admits. Whether or not he knew it, he was always Cherokee. The fish were down there, for him as much as for Annawake.

“Who’s going to tell that little girl who she is?”

. . . Franklin wears a Seiko watch and looks as Cherokee as Will Rogers or Elvis Presley . . . yet he knows he isn’t white because he can’t think of a single generalization about white people that he knows to be true. He can think of half a dozen about Cherokees.

Later, Annawake tackles Turtle’s adoptive mother, Taylor, who is deeply upset and offended that anyone would try to take her child away.

“There’s a law that gives Tribes the final say over custody of our own children. It’s called the Indian Child Welfare Act. Congress passed it in 1978 because so many Indian kids were being separated from their families and put into non-Indian homes.”

“I don’t understand what that has to do with me.” [Taylor says]

“It’s nothing against you personally, but the law is crucial. What we’ve been through is wholesale removal.”

“Well, that’s the past.”

“This is not General Custer. I’m talking about as recently as the seventies, when you and I were in high school. A third of all our kids were still being taken from their families and adopted into white homes. One out of three.”

. . . “My home doesn’t have anything to do with your tragedy.”

Pigs in Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins 1993)

___________________________________________

In a few short paragraphs, Kingsolver tackles identity, loss, and the desire for absolution from our ancestors’ sins. Her characters are morally and ethically imperfect, not fully “good” but—like Giles/Tony—“not bad,” and evolving into something better.

(See? I did get in a reference to Two Over Easy All Day Long after all.)

Kingsolver’s stories are full of grace, even when tackling the darkness we humans sometimes fling at each other. And humor, too, which is nothing short of miraculous; to look into the void and find, in addition to hatred and bias and hurt, an infinite well of laughter.

What does that have to do with me?

I’m a writer because I love to read, because ever since I was a child books have touched me, moved me, and, sometimes, changed my mind. I felt as if the authors were speaking directly to me, as if the characters were friends taking me along on their journey, whispering their revelations to me. I knew from the first time I opened a book and the symbols resolved themselves into words that this, this is what I wanted to do—speak through stories. Then and now, it often feels as though stories are my only meaningful form of communication. I often feel a Homer Simpson-ish ‘Doh! over every word I actually speak aloud, certain I’ve said the wrong thing, or failed to say the right thing.

Image by Elena Mozhvilo @miracleday

But when I write, I can test and weigh and sit with the words first, make sure that my words are honest, and sincere, and as often as possible, kind.

When I write, I can paint a verbal picture of how I see the world, and more importantly . . .

. . . how I imagine it could be.

The title of this, my inaugural newsletter, is A Good Book. I am, of course, hoping something I’ve written or something I write some day in the future will merit the label: A Good Book.

In the meantime, in the newsletters that follow, I’ll often share what I’m reading, in that elusive search for “A Good Book.”

Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven feels like a great place to start the conversation.

Got a good book to share? Thoughts on Pigs in Heaven? Drop me a line here, in the Comments,
or send me an email.