Category Archives: books

Ben Shattuck’s wonderful new book — Six Walks (In The Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau) — is built on a quest, of sorts. Shattuck wants to wander, and he uses six different adventures that Thoreau wrote about in various books and journals as a guide to leave home and explore. Where Thoreau goes, so goes Shattuck.

The result becomes more of an internal journey, as Shattuck uses the explorations (Cape Cod, New Hampshire, Maine, etc.) as a way to think about his own world, in the quiet of contemplation from being alone (mostly). Throughout the book, Shattuck weaves in the voice of Thoreau, in his many complications as a person and writer and thinker, while making his own observations of nature and the world.

Quite a bit of time passes between the first three walks and the last three, and Shattuck’s own life has changed, as he is engaged and has a child on the way, and the gap between that earlier, uncertain life and the one where he finds love as a force of stability gives the writing balance and ballast.

I enjoyed his observations of the forests and sea coasts and lakes, and the ability Shattuck has for weaving narrative from those observational strands, never flinching from difficult stories nor worrying about celebratory ones. And Thoreau hovers like a ghost in the book, his words and own travels guiding Shattuck forward into the wilderness of discovery.

I could see this book, and the model of the hikes inspired by another writer, as a possible text for folks who participate in the yearly Write Out adventures.

Peace (in the farther woods),
Kevin

Greil Marcus is a legend in rock music criticism, a longtime voice on the scene that often cuts through the surface of music to go deeper by observing the cultural moments and the lens of musical history. He can be witty, supportive and insightful, and he can just as quickly be harsh, snarky and critical. Whether you agree with him or not, he’s clear on what he thinks about a particular artist, song or cultural moment.

In his book Real Life Rock, Marcus gathered together decades of columns in various publications (starting with The Village Voice and ending in The Believer) of a column by the same name of the book, where Marcus uses the Top Ten list concept by examining music, culture, art, books, television, politics and whatever else caught his attention at the moment. (Note: he also has a new book out, with more recent columns)

For each of the ten topics in any given column, he mostly opines in only a few sentences, although there are other times when he takes liberty with the space offered, writing a short editorial beneath any given topic. You can tell he has found something passionate, and has sunk his hooks into an issue. His breadth of knowledge is pretty impressive.

Common artists emerge across time for his opinion (often skeptical but sometimes celebratory): Bob Dylan, cover albums, the Mekons, Lucinda Williams, Bonny Prince Billy, Sleater-Kinney, Allison Krause, and more.

I flipped to a page in the book, and here are the topics at a glance, which give a sense of the wide scope of Marcus interests:

• Dido’s Thank You song (and what Eminem did with it)
• Live concert of Rock Your Baby (Portland) by Dick Slessig Combo
• Billy Bragg and Wilco (Woody Guthrie covers in Mermaid Avenue Vol.2)
• Shalini (singer from North Carolina)
• Thread Waxing Space (art display in NYC) – life casts of musicians

Reading his pieces across time (1986 through 2014) is pretty fascinating, and even if I skipped through many of his pieces as I sort of did a power reading tour of musical criticism, Marcus’ voice is always loud and clear, confident and critical. I didn’t always agree with him but I always kept on reading him. The rewards in terms of tiny nuggets of insights were always worth the time.

Peace (in books about music),
Kevin

Ann E. Burg’s Flooded: Requiem for Johnstown, a novel in verse, is a powerful set of interlocking character stories, informed by historical record, that lays bare the tragedy of the dam that burst in the working-class town outside of Pittsburgh, and all that died as a result.

Even worse, the story reminds us that the powerful and wealthy (ie, Andrew Carnegie, etc.), who bought the abandoned dammed-up lake for summer recreation and then failed to invest enough in its upkeep and maintenance, are clearly to blame for the 1889 disaster, and were never really held accountable. They blamed nature, not themselves.

Flooded is told in poetic verse, through the voices of children of the town as they prepare for Decoration Day, honoring veterans of the Civil War. Burg stitches together their stories and voices through some researched historical records, and with the freedom of a fiction writer. The result is a moving quilt of life, from the eyes and lives of young people, brought into the chaos of the flood, and the destruction of the town, and the loss of many, many lives, on that day when the dam breached and the water ran downhill.

The river, too, has a voice here, as it weaves its own story in between narrative sections, with narrow text formatting to visually show the winding path of its waters, and warning us of how it might never be tamed, and is always wild.

The last section of the book, where Burg uses anonymous letters and numbers as identification, is both insightful and, at times, both despairing and hopeful, the wishes of the dead for the survivors to carry on, to press ahead, to make something good in the world, to remember the stories. She even uses faded font texts to indicate those whose lives were taken, their ghost voices rises from the pages like distant music, and those who survived, devastated by loss but intent on moving forward.

As I read Flooded, I was reminded of the great 1874 Mill River Flood in my area of Western Massachusetts, in which a dam burst, towns were destroyed, lives lost or forever altered, and the wealthy — who ignored the upkeep of the dam, were never held accountable. Sound familiar? That river is one I walk by all the time, and the memorials erected and reminders we have (including a map of the flood on a wall of our house) is never far away from our thoughts. And I have Burg’s structure in my mind now, too, and how stories can be told.

Peace (comes after a time),
Kevin

Any book, about books, that introduces me to a wider possibility of stories and selections is always something I am interested in. Add art, and I’m hooked. For Bibliophile: Diverse Spines, Jamie Harper and Jane Mount gather and feature a breathtaking collection of books of all genres — fiction, non-fiction, poetry, picture books, etc. And as the subtitle suggests, the focus is on diverse stories and diverse authors and illustrators.

There were many books and writers I had not yet encountered, and I dogeared a few pages in my book, to go back to remind myself of the discoveries when I am needing something new to read. Even just flipping through this collection, it’s a joy to see a celebration of books and covers, with snippets of insights from Harper and Mount on every page.

And if you like this one, be sure to check out Jane Mount’s last collection, just entitled Bibliophile. Like this newest one, it is also a visual feast and celebration of books of all sorts.

Peace (in the spines),
Kevin

I admit: I didn’t have the right frame of mind as I read this short novella about a familiar character: Lyra. I am an avid reader of Philip Pullman and eagerly await the next book in his most recent series The Book of Dust. This small book — Serpentine — is a sort of in-between, set in the time when the first series (His Dark Materials) ended and the current series (Book of Dust) begins.

I didn’t realize that it was little more than an lingering idea of Pullman that came to fruition during a charity auction, and it was then that the story he wrote and sold off was pulled into this small novella, filled with evocative charcoal illustrations by Tom Duxbury. The story isn’t really a story, and would confuse anyone not familiar with the two series. The book is more of a written sketch of Lyra and her daemon exploring the notion of being separated, and what that means, as they head back north to ask questions of an old acquaintance about their situation.

Not much happens, plot-wise, and little is revealed, but the narrative here does connect to The Book of Dust and forms a bit of a bridge between the two series, which Pullman explains was his whole idea for conceiving Serpentine. I borrowed this  novella from the library, so it was a quick afternoon read that pulled me back into Pullman’s world for a bit, and that’s worked just fine.

Peace (connected by a string),
Kevin

I read Ain’t Burned All The Bright, the new book by Jason Reynold and Jason Griffin, five times in three days — the first, to just read it. The second, to read the words. The third, to read the images. The fourth, to flip and remix the pages, and wonder at how such efforts could surface even more stories. The fifth was to remix it … I’ll share that tomorrow.

How to explain this book? It’s a three-sentence text (long sentences, but still, just three) by Reynolds spanning over pages and pages of beautiful and evocative collage art by Griffin, and each flip of the page is another surprise.

The “story,” such as it is, can be read a few different ways, I suppose, but it has themes of the street violence and protest of the last few years, hints at the effects of Covid, and a family, in which the narrator is one of the children, struggling to hold it all together. The book is in three parts — three breaths – with a refrain of breathing in and breathing out.

It’s serious and it’s joyful — and it is this teetering of emotional zigzag that resonates so strongly through multiple readings. The mom is stuck in front of the television the whole book, watching the news. The dad is isolated in the parents’ bedroom, coughing up a storm. The brother is playing a video game and the sister is on her phone, and our narrator is just trying to break through all this clutter of life to get their/our attention.

These scenes of life inside an apartment, and the way the text (typed, cut and pasted) unfold against the small works of art by Griffin (really, every page could be framed and hung on a gallery wall) demonstrates the power of multi-literacies at work in tandem with each other.

Add the “is anyone still here?” question/answer authors’ section at the back of the book, where the two Jasons (friends since college), talk about where the seeds of this collaborative came from, and it’s all just a powerful, magical textural/artistic experience unlike any other.

I’m going back in to read it for a sixth time (rare for me). It’s that kind of book.

Peace (breathing in/breathing out),
Kevin

This is my kind of book — a songwriter taking apart each and every song, from where the words came from, to how a song fell into place, and using the process to tell a larger story of a life in music — but the two-volume The Lyrics (1956 to the Present) by Paul McCartney would be a bit too much for the casual listener. And it would be a hit on the wallet (for me, this was a combined holiday gift from my children).

While many of the songs here in this collection from McCartney’s later life were not familiar to me, the Beatles’ songs and the early Wings’ songs certainly were (my first vinyl LP was Wings: At The Speed of Sound) , and as I perused the lyrics, I could hear the songs playing in my head. Each song lyric sheet comes with a narrative that McCartney pulled together, with help of writer/poet Paul Muldoon, and McCartney’s life as a curious observer of life and explorer of songs comes through.

As a songwriter myself, I was most curious about the gathering of early drafts of lyric sheets, arrows and scratches, recording studio notes about instrumental tracks, photographs inside the studios, and the other ephemeral items from a life of making songs. You can see handwritten notes and chord changes, and doodles in the margins, and all the things that show a creative mind at work.

After watching the six hours of the recent Beatles movie, and then reading this book, I’m McCartney-ed out at this point, but I was glad for the journey into songs, and appreciate how he has long developed his craft, but also the ability to recognize, seize and develop inspiration from wherever it comes, and to always be ready for the moment when a song arrives.

Peace (singing it),
Kevin