Recurring themes - Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

I am drawn to stories that feature bookstores, most likely because it is my secret desire to own one of my own. Not all stories about bookstores are happy, but all of them have an important message within them. My most recent bookstore read is Matthew Sullivan's Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, which centers around Lydia Smith one of the employees. Lydia we learn is a survivor of a horrific crime one that has changed her and how she relates to the world. To compound to her sorrows, she is the first to discover the body of a customer who has committed suicide in the store. He has left her a clue - a photograph of herself at her tenth birthday party surrounded by her two best friends.

The story continues to unfold as we learn about Lydia's past and how she begins to unravel the unusual suicide notes left behind by Joey. Joey has cleverly paired books that he owns with books still in stock at the store, his books have windows cut out from them which when overlaid the corresponding pages in the store's books reveal a message. Lydia is forced to find the truth about how her past and Joey's are intertwined.  

What through me for a loop (SPOILER ALERT) was that central to this story is the search for a birth parent. This is the second book this month that I've read that featured this theme at its heart (see post on Celine). Of course this may simply be another case of Baader-Meinhof (see post) that I am experiencing. Either way, both of these novels reveal the heartbreak of families when they are separated from one another. 

Transplanting - The Little French Bistro

Transplanting - Art journal
mixed media

If you are a gardner like me, you know that every once in a while you must pull up a plant and move it. Early in my gardening career I needed to learn how to pair a plant with its sun needs. Sure the nursery is kind enough to give you a plant stake in the pot to help with placement but what do they really mean by part sun/part shade or full sun. Is that spot in your yard which gets some shade really partial shade or not? It is only by getting to know your yard do you discover how to nurture your garden. Kind of like your own soul.

But things change, nothing stays the same and that is true of your garden and soul. Trees grow and cast new patterns of shade. Soil needs to be amended. Plants grow larger and need to be pruned and moved about. The same happens to us, we change, we grow, we stagnate, we allow fear to overwhelm us, and the next thing - if we are lucky enough - we find ourselves desperate for change, and that's where Marianne of Nina George's The Little French Bistro finds herself.

Marianne is a sixty year old, German woman who finds herself in Paris the famous place of light, love, art, food and she is desperate to rid herself of her husband and her old way of life - desperate enough to throw herself off a bridge and into the Seine hoping to end her misery. She is furious when a homeless man witnesses her suicide attempt and jumps in to save her. A night in a psychiatric hospital, one counseling session with a doctor, finds Marianne stealing a painted tile from a nurse's desk, on which is depicted a scene of a French port where she has decided to travel in order to end her life. SPOILER ALERT - She doesn't succeed.

Marianne, however, does succeed in finding herself. The lesson here is that we can begin the search for our inner beauty, for our passion in life through work that brings joy, we can make like minded friends, we can find love and sexuality, at any time whether it be our twenties, forties, or sixties. It's never too late. Better yet it is important to start sooner rather than later. The pull of our old ways of thinking, that miserable stinking thinking, is strong. Even Marianne is fooled and trapped by it when her husband comes to find her. Luckily her internal sense that her soul is dying in this man's presence and that she doesn't want to experience that for a day longer sends her fleeing from him once more.

What is it in my life that makes me feel dead inside? For that is a clear sign that life needs changing. And like a plant or a Marianne (I spell my name with a y by the way - coincidence? I wonder.), I can be transplanted. Dig one's self up out of the soil carefully not to damage roots, shake free those roots so that they will be free to absorb water and nutrients from its new location. Perhaps there is some pruning to be done to encourage new growth. Maybe some extra babying with frequent waterings and a shot of good fertilizer. Then that plant or person can stretch out their roots and become a new member of the garden community, playing a key role that can only be filled by them.

Not your typical detective - Celine

Celine - art journal page

For the second time this summer, I found myself reading a story that involved a teenaged girl from a wealthy American family who finds herself pregnant during the years following World War II. Unlike Charlie St. Claire in Kate Quinn's The Alice Network (see my post) who is 19 and decides to keep her baby, Celine Watkins, of Peter Heller's novel Celine, is only 15 and her baby is given up for adoption. Both young women had difficult decisions to make regarding their pregnancy. Celine's decision would help to determine the course of the rest of her life.

After delivering her baby Celine returned to her private boarding school to complete her studies, went off to college, married and had a son. She was the unconventional member of her family by becoming a private detective and not your typical one at that. Celine only takes cases involving missing family members; often clients are looking for birth parents or children. On her travels, Celine continues to search the faces of women who would be the right age to be the daughter that she gave up all those years ago. As the novel unfolds, we learn about who Celine is and her family history. She is now in her sixties, remarried to Pete, suffering from emphysema, artist, master of acting, and a crack shot. We meet her adult son, Hank, who has learned his mother's secret from his dying aunt. Unknown to Celine, Hank in his early twenties went looking for his missing sister, and he might just have found her.

Celine's current case is  brought to her by Gabriella who is searching for her father a famous photographer who was presumed dead, eaten by a grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park. But there are way to many loose threads to the case when Celine picks up the trail. Celine and Pete have arrived in Jackson Hole to begin their hunt for Gabriella's father and she comments about this town as being only in existence as a location for fun which is very tiring, "Pursuing fun is exhausting. Having fun is just fun. Much more relaxing just to do your work, don't you think? I mean if you enjoy it. (p.138)" What a statement about the American way of life - we work really hard in order to have the time to chase our happiness. In fact Pete responds to her with this, "It's why I always felt coming back to the States after traveling was a bit stressful. I mean our job as citizens, apparently, is the pursuit of happiness. Something I always have to gird myself for. I'd much rather just be happy, or not. (p. 139)"

Being happy has been a topic of mine in earlier posts (Hector and the Search for Happiness, The Happiness Project, and Happiness on the Mind), and I think Pete's quote above hits the nail on the head - happiness is a decision to be or not to be. We can't find happiness by pursuing it (see how i became stupid) rather it is something that comes from within. I believe that we can pursue fun, excitement gained by doing activities,  spending time with other people, or engaging in hobbies. But too many of us work very hard to get those things we think will bring us happiness - a thinner body, a bigger bank account, a house in a better neighborhood, the promotion at work, a new spouse, and the list goes on. What we lose is the precious time to just be. I attended the funeral of a wonderful woman this week, and I know that when she came to her last moments it wasn't her bank account she was thinking about, but the precious time that she had spent being herself for that was her greatest accomplishment and didn't everyone at her funeral say so. This woman was authentic, she used her big booming voice and she wasn't afraid to tell you just how it was. That's the lesson for all of us to take away - to be happy, to be ourselves, to go out there and do life. Thanks Patricia B. for the lesson.

Little Free Libraries - There's a Cozy Mystery for That

Little Free Library - mixed media
acrylic, magazine scraps, ink stamps, pen

Several years ago now, over dinner my son explained something new he had learned at school (yes sometimes children do have an answer to the "What did you do at school today?" question) something called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. What is that you might ask? Well, the phrase originally came from a West German militant group that formed in the 1970s that included two members with the names Baader and Meinhof, but in the 1990s was used to describe that thing that happens to us when we see or hear something and then it continues to crop up. True to form, shortly after my son explained Baader-Meinhof to me I read it in a book and then encountered it somewhere else. Too strange.

How does this relate to today's post you might ask, well remember about two or three posts back I mentioned my librarian friend's Little Free Library that she has in her yard? I had taken a book (how i became stupid) which I read and reviewed here. Meanwhile, I needed a new audiobook title to listen to and searched on new additions (see post on The Murder at the House of Rooster Happiness) and found A Most Curious Murder by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli. This cozy mystery opens with the destruction of a Little Library built by the narrator's deceased father, and maintained by her mother. In a Michigan town with no library of its own, this Little Library served the community and its loss is seen as an outrage. Soon after, the man suspected of committing the vandalism is found murdered. Obviously, there is more to the story of just a vandal at work.

In the course of my reading life I have come across many a cozy mystery story. If you have an interest or a passion for something there is a cozy mystery out there for you. Do you like cooking or baking? There is Diane Mott Davidson's catering series or Joanna Fluke's bakery series. Need something to drink with those yummy treats? Try a tea shop mystery by Laura Childs or a coffee house mystery by Cleo Coyle. Do you knit, quilt, do needlepoint? There's Maggie Sefton, Earlene Fowler, and Monica Ferris.  Maybe you're into gardening, or vintage cookware, antiques, fixer-uppers, Bed and Breakfasts, libraries, I could go on all day, but the point is there is a cozy mystery out there to match any and all of your interests. Just think about it for a while and our old friend Baader-Meinhof will make sure you come across just what you need.

The Butterfly Effect - How It All Began

ButterflyTangle - art journal piece:
acrylic, zentangle, fabric and vintage book scraps

Penelope Lively opens her novel How It All Began with a quote from James Gleick regarding the Butterfly Effect, how the flapping of a butterfly's wings in one place can impact the weather somewhere half way around the world. It was Edward Lorenz of MIT, who in 1961, while trying to come up with a way to model weather patterns using computers, discovered that it would be almost impossible to generate longterm forecasts because we are unable to measure precisely enough the factors that we input into the model.

But how does weather modeling come into Lively's story? It doesn't. What does is the opening event - the mugging of an elderly woman named Charlotte. That event creates a cascade through the small group of Lively's characters who don't even know that they are connected to one another. You know it's like meeting someone who it turns out knows so-and-so and before you know it they are your neighbor's third cousin twice removed.

Charlotte is a former Literature teacher and in retirement a literacy volunteer. The mugging has resulted not only in the loss of her purse, but an injury: a broken hip. While convalescing, she finds it hard to focus on the one thing that has always sustained her - reading. "Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even (p. 34)." How frustrating it must have been to her during this time not to have the solace that comes from reading. When my father was in the hospital and we were waiting a diagnosis, I knew that he was truly ill because after a lifetime of watching him reading, he didn't. He wasn't tempted by the daily paper, magazines or a book. When the diagnosis did come, Stage IV lung cancer, it was a swift five weeks to his passing.  I would not see him read again.

Like Charlotte, I read to learn about other cultures, what it is like to be a different age, have more or less money, how to overcome a broken heart, to be a brilliant scientist, an intrepid explorer, and the list goes on and on. "She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without (p. 35)." How beautifully put, of course I am who I am because of what I've experienced but also what I have read. The thoughts of others, whether I've encountered them in person or through a book, and like the beating of a butterfly's wings, have had some effect on me. In return we may never know how our lives and words may effect someone else somewhere half way around the world from us.

Picking a book because of its cover

Artist Paintbox
from a visit to an open studio

There's a reason for cover art and that's to entice us to pick the book up and give it a closer look. How did they do it in the old days when all the books were bound in leather with gold tooling on the spine one looking pretty much like every other one? I imagine the quintessential Englishmen's library as featured in movies and design magazines.  I love strolling among the shelves looking for something that peaks my interest.

There are other methods to searching cover art for inspiration like flipping through BookPage: America's Book Review so thoughtfully left in the teacher's workspace by our wonderful school librarian. Her ploy is to get teachers to help with providing suggestions for the school catalogue, but I use it for my personal reading gain. There it was on the page, a cover featuring an open watercolor palette and brush, Julia Glass's A House Among the Trees.

Mort Lear, famous illustrator and children's book author, has foolishly, especially at his advancing age, climbed up onto the roof to clean away some debris left by a storm, only to fall to his death. His long time, live-in personal assistant Tomasina (Tommy) Daulair has inherited the house along with the responsibility of managing his literary/artistic estate. Enter a small cast of characters whose lives have been touch some way or another by Mort and his artwork. There is Meredith a museum curator to whom Mort as promised to donate a large portion of his work upon his death; Franklin his lawyer; Nick the actor who is to play Mort in a biopic movie; and Dani, Tommy's younger brother, who unwittingly served as the model for Mort's breakout work. It is through these people that we learn about Mort's character and his past. He presented a different face to each of them as he worked hard to hide his real self.

Mort, like many, suffered a trauma in his childhood which he never spoke about and kept hidden. The keeping of secrets leads one to develop mechanisms to protect the self, and prevent the rest of the world from knowing the truth. We are afraid that the world will not understand. They will judge us harshly regardless of the fact that we are a victim and not the perpetrator. As a result we become stunted. It is only by Mort's death and the coming together of this small group of characters that we can come to know the real Mort, and the truth is the real Mort lost out on a lot of life by holding onto his secrets. Finding the courage to voice our secrets allows us to be freed of them thereby giving us the opportunity to use all the energy that was dissipated in keeping those secrets and channel it into living more fully.

LFL Find - how i became stupid

Be Yourself - collage of magazine
and decorative paper scraps

As promised from my earlier post regarding Little Free Libraries,  here is a quick review of the book I chose - Martin Page's how i became stupid.

Twenty-five year old Antoine thinks to much. He goes through life examining each choice he makes. In fact he couldn't decide what to study in college so he has an eclectic assortment of skills by which he ekes out a meager living. Luckily, he has a posse of equally unique friends, all trying to make their way through life living in Paris.

Problem is Antoine thinks he's pretty unhappy with the way his life is going so he writes a manifesto regarding his issue - "The process of thought is not a natural one, it hurts; it's as if I were uncovering pieces of broken glass and lengths of barbed wire in the air. I can't seem to stop my brain or to slow it down.... Everything I see, feel, and hear throws itself into the furnace of my mind, fires it up and makes it charge on full steam ahead" (p. 56).  Over-thinker that he is he sets out to become more happy and his first attempt is to become an alcoholic. Never in my life, or that of the drunk in the bar that Antoine encounters, have I read of someone who diligently studies up on the subject before setting out to become an alcoholic. Turns out even with all his researching, that Antoine is super sensitive to alcohol and a mere half a glass of beer puts him into a coma.

Antoine, if anything, is persistent in trying to become happy. He finally resorts to prescription antidepressants and ringing up an old classmate who has become a wildly successful stockbroker. Like everything else Antoine throws himself into learning about the buying and selling of shares and with the help of decaffeinated coffee (I'll let you read to find out how this was done) becomes a millionaire. Of course now Antoine must pursue the life of a millionaire, and like many a millionaire he is doomed to lose it all.

At twice Antoine's age I have to laugh at his antics. Antoine thinks he's unhappy because he isn't like everyone else - he's unique. What he doesn't realize at the beginning of the book is that being unique may be hard in our world, but it makes us truly happy people. For most people they strive all their lives to be like everyone else. No where is it more apparent than in the halls of the high school I teach in. Girls who all have the same color hair (whether it is natural or not) cut in the same style, wearing the same black yoga pants and Ugg boots. Or boys with their basketball shorts and neon colored sneakers. It's the kids on the fringe who don't fit in you sometimes worry about, but they may actually have achieved what the others have not - self awareness. They already may know that following the pack is not going to make them happy. For other people it takes years, or they may never discover, that trying to keep up with the Joneses will never make them happy.