April Showers Bring May Flowers—and Cool Books
April 5, 2009

Spring and autumn are the times of the year when I sense my reading choices changing. When it’s cold, the books I wanted to curl up with on the sofa, wool blanket and cats draped on me, a cup of tea or warm milk near at hand, tend to be classical novels or nonfiction. This just past winter saw me reading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, Anna Karenina and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell’s and Michel de Montaige’s essays, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula by Barbara Belford, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition by Randall Woods, Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life by Caroline Moorhead, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whitehead Parsons by George Pendle, Résistance by Agnès Humbert, and Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Louise Bryant by Mary Dearborn. I also favor adventure travel and in winter lean to “hot” area adventures with books like Conquering the Desert of Death: Across the Taklamakan by Charles Blackmore and The Eighth Continent: Life, Death, and Discovery in the Lost World of Madagascar by Peter Tyson.

What I see these books having in common is a certain literary weightiness. Not all of the same weight, of course. Because while it may initially appear that a biography of Louise Bryant has little in common with the complex novels of Tolstoy what they both require is attention if their stories are to be contemplated, absorbed, lived. The reason I favor these kinds of books is because I want to wrap myself as in their words and worlds much as I do in my blanket. I want to feel the struggles, achievements, difficulties, passions, and bastardizations that are a common thread. I want to fall into the solidity of these people and these stories. There’s something undeniably appealing to me about reading of endless, waterless landscapes and miserably humid rainforests, of overcoming societal and gender expectations, of minds gone mad or wise, of political passions so strong they changed not just their owners but the worlds around them.

Come spring, though, I begin to think about “summer-weight” books, those that make me feel lighter and cooler. A few mysteries, perhaps a thriller or two, travel adventure to cold places where I can feel the ice upon my forehead, lighter biographies, humor, even a collection of short stories. These are things I don’t normally read in the fall or winter months. However, this time of year, with days getting warmer but nights still comfortably cool my nightstand is sporting both winter and summer books. Two uneven piles hog most of the space forcing the lamp, fan and small clock radio into corners. Some are coming. Some will soon be going. But right now they are easily mixing so I can read as the mood suits.

Among the growing summer volumes are a thriller (Chernobyl Murders), three books on travel (The Shape of Water, Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip, and Berserk: My Voyage to the Antarctic in a Twenty-Seven-Foot Sailboat), a mystery (To Each His Own), two true crime stories (American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, The Birth of the “It” Girl and the Crime of the Century and Illegal Tender: Gold, Greed, and the Mystery of the Lost 1933 Double Eagle), one book on history (The Archimedes Codes: How a Medieval Prayer Book is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity’s Greatest Scientist), one novel (The Geographer’s Library), and one on American culture (American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn).

In order to list these titles I had to retrieve them from the nightstand. Before writing their names here I fondled them, opening their pages, reading the back cover or flaps, and feeling the excitement of the transition they represent. I don’t have a preference for any season over another, but the sense of movement into not just new books but a new season of reading is exciting. While April showers may indeed bring May flowers, the season of spring also brings literary freshness. For the next several months, I plan to indulge myself in iced tea, tomato sandwiches with my literary mysteries, ice cream with Antarctica explorations, gazpacho with gold theft, borscht with Russian thrillers. Because summer is arriving.

Upcoming Book Festivals:
Ohio hosts the upcoming Akron Antiquarian Book Fair on Friday, April 10 and Saturday, April 11. More than sixty dealers will be sharing and selling collectible and rare books at the John S. Knight Center in downtown Akron. Admission is $5 for most with students paying $3. For more information, call .

The Pub House:
“Personal journey with social relevance” is the foundation behind the books Behler Publications publishes. And by that I do not mean “New Age-y.” Rather, Behler focuses on fiction and nonfiction that “highlights personal introspection with a social conscience - literature that is timeless and touches all emotional and physical aspects of our lives.”

It’s a surprisingly flexible statement that includes books like the upcoming A Different Shade of Blue, the story of  how women forever changed police work after a 1961 lawsuit ended gender segregation through the personal voices of fifty such officers in the Seattle Police Department; Donovan’s Paradigm, a medical thriller that explores the growing movement of Mind/Body medicine and its impact on traditional medical practices and physicians’ belief systems; and Marching Up Madison Avenue, a memoir of a lifetime spent in advertising, changing Americans’ thinking on products, services and even politics.

Of Interest:
Public school teachers are having to make do with smaller and smaller budgets for their students’ needs even as the needs are growing. Donors Choose is a nonprofit organization that aims to help meet specific requests. Teachers submit project proposal for materials or experiences that their students need to learn. Donors, in turn, browse the list of the screened and approved requests, and then donate any amount of money to the project of their choice. The organization purchases the materials and ships them directly to the teacher. Shortly thereafter, donors receive notes from both the teacher and the students along with a photograph of the students working with their new materials. Requests range from digital items like printers, laptops, and camcorders as well as books, a reading rug, magnetic boards, model dough, bookshelves, soil, plastic containers and pitchers, picture cards, comprehension games, rubber bands and more. Items rarely cost more than a few hundred dollars, and any donation is useful. This is a way to make even a small donation go a long way.  

This Week . . .
Dying Speeches & Bloody Murders is a part of the special collections of the Harvard Law School Library. This particular collection is composed of crime broadsides labeled “Last Dying Speeches” or “Bloody Murders,” and somewhat similar to programs sold at sporting events today, sold to audiences who gathered to witness public executions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. They were cheap and written to pander to the middle and lower classes. The printers who specialized in them would feature a titillating illustration accompanied by a sensational account of the crime, trial and/or confession. Harvard has more than 500 of these that span the years 1707 to 1891. Search methods include type of crime, year of publication, site of publication, printers, condemned, or victim.

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

Lauren