Category Archives: Book Club

Doggedly bookish

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It’s a grateful Sunday. Gray and occasionally misty outdoors, following a day or so of strong but not scary wind, all I believe remnants of Hurricane Helene, which moved so much more quickly than most post-hurricane storm systems. I’m tired of gray, rainy days, but grateful to have my home in tact, no giant limbs ripped from trees, no heartbreak.

A friend in Georgia has heartbreak, a home and yard she loved in tatters, trees through the roof, ceilings collapsed. The home is uninhabitable, probably reparable eventually but currently with no power, a gas leak in the area, and of course that jagged opening to the sky. My friend has decamped to Atlanta, grateful that she, her husband and dog were uninjured, but devastated by this abrupt loss and the uncertainty that is now her world.

Friends in Florida were lucky this time, and they and I are grateful for that. At the same time, we’re reminded again how precarious the world is and especially the climate. We have done this to ourselves, and here in the Midwest it’s still easy—though terribly short-sighted—to not be worried. Our temperatures have risen, spring comes earlier, and here in September the leaves are already falling from some trees. Tornados and other dangerously severe storm systems are more common. It’s not the same climate I grew up in. While it’s a grateful Sunday, it’s also a wary one, worried for friends, worried for our interconnected future.

So I read

Meanwhile, what better to do with gray days that read and cuddle with a dog? I’ve just finished my Roger Angell book (This Old Man), having started down the rabbit hole of other reading it inspired even before closing the cover. I’ve checked one Angell-inspired book out on Hoopla, placed a library hold on another, and read two poems that Angell singled out for praise: Elizabeth Bishop’s “Poem,” and Philip Levine’s “Turkeys.” I confess I don’t yet love either one as much as Angell did. But I’m still re-reading them, and one of Levine’s lines stuck its claws into me instantaneously: “… The next year / spring came late if / at all. …”

Wow.

Wonderland

The rabbit hole already has opened into a warren I might get lost in, as looking for the Bishop poem I chanced on this blog post about it, referencing an essay discussing it in the introduction of a book, and now I also have a blog post and a book introduction to read.

All of which reminds me of something I read not long ago in defense of owning books you might never read, wherein someone made an argument that books aren’t only for reading. That’s right. Discovering books nourishes the soul, too—reading the back cover or the first paragraphs or pages in the book store and having those grab your interest so that you want to read it right then, even if you already have 200 books awaiting your attention, even if after you get it home you never recapture that moment of being thrilled and intrigued and the book ultimately goes unread in your home.

Meanwhile, I’m off to book club in an hour to discuss Dawn Turner’s memoir Three Girls from Bronzeville, which I read shortly after it was published in 2021 and haven’t reread but hope to remember clearly enough to profit from the conversation. On our way to book club, we’ll stop at the library to drop off Roger Angell and pick up the on-hold book it led me to by Donald Barthelme.

Enter Elwood, stage left

Did you notice where I mentioned cuddling with a dog earlier? We said goodbye to our Tank on August 1—I hope one day to be able to write about this, but for now it’s still too raw—and have been living without a dog in the house for the first time in 30 years. That ended last Sunday, when we drove into Chicago and met Duke, a shy 6-year-old beagle. We brought him home on a trial basis—because we have two rabbits (Tank’s best friends) who occupy a hutch in our living room; any dog we bring in has to be able to co-exist—and so far, so good. We believe we are headed toward adoption, in which case Duke will become Elwood. We would not normally rename a 6-year-old dog, but this guy truly does not recognize Duke as his name and responded to Elwood the moment we tried it out.

Already we’re growing attached, both to this sweet beagle and to the renewed experience of living with a dog. The greetings, the wiggles, the cuddles, the outings to the woods, the soft scent of dog. Elwood bounds into the room and tiptoes into our hearts.




Bookish Saturday

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Gorgeous weather outside this morning, but so far it’s been a bookish Saturday. I ended the workweek at 11:50 p.m. with a dip into the Chicago poetry anthology Wherever I’m At, and I opened the weekend with my face burrowed back into Roger Angell’s This Old Man, which in the space of only a few minutes took me on a ride of reminiscences (Angell’s) that left me with multiple new additions to both my want-to-read book list and my want-to-see movie list.

Happy sigh, when my reading adds to, rather than subtracts from, my ever-growing book list. Also, when I need to add two random scraps of paper (today that would be a flimsy receipt torn into pieces) to the one bookmark actually needed to mark my place because, of course, there are passages in the book that I want to be able to go back and find easily when needed.

Let’s put “needed” in quotes, but honestly the soul does need these moments.

It’s not all happy news today, though. Our bookstore is closing. We’ve known this for weeks, probably more than a month, but I continue to face it with a mixture of sadness and denial. It doesn’t seem possible. Perhaps I’m at an age now where more and more of my good friends will quietly die off, but to start with my bookstore seems a cruelty. This shop has nurtured so many memories, supplied so many gifts to friends and family, provided so many hours of discovery, I can’t imagine life without it. The only good news is that it hasn’t failed to thrive; the owners have simply worn themselves out with its running. They don’t want to sell to someone else because they don’t trust anyone else with its name and its customer list. I respect that. And yet…

So later today, I’ll probably find myself once again cruising its shelves to see if anything calls my name and demands to come home with me. Bittersweet, as it feels more than a little like picking at the bones.

Heavy sigh.

Fledgling

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Today may have been the day the fledglings flew.

I’ve been watching the nest—a Cooper’s hawk nest three blocks away—closely for the better part of at least two weeks, hoping not to miss the fledging. In my wildest dreams, I would be right there when one or more of the babes flew for the first time. Realistically, I think my main hope was to monitor the situation and know—or nearly know, as much as possible without actually seeing—when it had happened.

I missed it last year. After weeks of watching the nest, from its construction, to Mama Hawk sitting it by herself first for weeks, even before having eggs to warm (they really do this!), clear through to little heads peering occasionally above its rim, I was on vacation when the fledglings flew. It was a needed and happy vacation—almost certainly Hound Dog’s last one, and he enjoyed it—but I was sad to come home and find the nest emptied, defunct. Sadder than ever I would have imagined.

So with Hound Dog unable to travel anymore, and his people no longer willing to leave him in anyone else’s care, I’ve pinned a lot of hope on being around for this year’s fledging. The hawks are back at the same nest for a second straight year. (I say “the hawks,” but I’ve no idea whether it’s the same birds, young who were raised in the nest last year, or an entirely different pair that happened upon it and found it. What I do know is that it has been occupied with Cooper’s hawks yet again, more joy for me.) And I’ve been watching it closely, walking past multiple times each day, once even making The Husband stop the car so I could get out and check the view on the way to some outing or other.

This past week or two has seen a lot of activity. The adults have been perched just outside the nest most of the time, sometimes seeming to feed the babes but often just perched, as if there weren’t actually enough room inside for them anymore. Two to three days ago, I saw a pair of youngsters perched on nest’s edge, flapping a bit, probably testing out those wings, while one of the adults called out from a nearby tree, perhaps encouraging them to soar.

I haven’t actually seen any of the young (and how many are there, even?) fly from the nest. But this morning when I went past, I saw no birds at all for the first morning in more than a week. I did hear one hawk call from nearby, but the nest looked empty. Had they flown? It seemed likely. From my vantage point down below, of course, there’s no way to be sure, but…

This afternoon, as I stood chatting with my neighbor outside our two houses, a young hawk flew overhead. One of the babes from my nest three blocks away? I think so. It’s the first time all summer that I’ve seen a hawk on my block, and it was a small one. I’ll keep watching that nest, but I think our little family might have lifted off.

Though I’m uncertain about the hawks, there’s no question that a hummingbird just made its daily pass among the branches of the large tree on my tree lawn. I never knew before that they would feed in trees, but this one does a fly-through every day, hovering branch to branch in apparent search for food. My lilacs also attract hummingbirds when in bloom, and the trumpet vine in the back yard is in full glory right now, so we have plenty of nectar for those long beaks.

The plants feed the hummingbirds. The hummingbirds feed my soul.

Today is also the day that I finished Tracy K. Smith’s memoir To Free the Captives. More than memoir (not that memoir isn’t enough!), it’s an exploration of racism and Black history and shared history, and a (perhaps) prayer for progress and equity and healing. It reads often like poetry, almost one long prose poem, as much as the series of essays that it is. It’s moving, thought-provoking, challenging, and I expect I’ll be thinking about it for quite some time.

This has been memoir month for me, as the book I read immediately before this one was Knife, Salman Rushdie’s memoir of the 2022 knife attack that nearly killed him. I’m still thinking about this one, too, as well as about expanding my list-of-books-I’ve read-by-Salman-Rushdie. It’s been a long time since I read his fiction, the last time being my second pass through Midnight’s Children, courtesy of my book club, and I miss it. I’m reminded of seeing him speak about his writing and free speech as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival—hardly seems possible that was nine years ago, but apparently it was.

Ringing out the year

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I have so many things I want to write about today! Reading, the end of this seemingly endless year, the deer that visited our front yard overnight while we slept…

Let’s start there, with the deer.

I took this photo thinking it would be a Wordless Wednesday post here on the blog. Then I got up this morning and wrote it into my #frontstooppoetry for the day. So, words, which means not wordless.

My husband and I saw this in the snow when we opened the gate from our side yard to head out to the sidewalk for our first walk of the day yesterday.

#frontstooppoetry by Kim Kishbaugh Who were you? / Doe, fawn or buck / who nibbled from the lilac / and left this / single hoof print / in the snow? (Dec. 31, 2020)

A single deer had walked right into the branches of our front-yard lilac tree, and from there we couldn’t tell where it had gone. Right on through? Maybe, but the tracks on the other side were definitely a rabbit’s. Either a rabbit obscured deer tracks, or the deer backed out the way it came. We could see only about three hoof prints, so it’s possible this deer used the sidewalk and veered into our yard only for a quick snack. I’ve seen it happen in the daylight. I know lots of people consider deer pests; to me, they’re graceful and beautiful creatures, with whom I’m generally happy to share a garden. It brightened my day to know I had hosted one in the wee hours.

Reading out the year

Lots of my friends are tallying up the books they’ve read this year and sharing the numbers on social media. Not me. I’ve found reading difficult this year. Oftentimes I’ve found myself too anxious to focus on reading anything longer than a poem, and for a short while leading up to and following Election Day, I couldn’t even read poetry. As a friend said to me recently, my relationship with books has been a troubled one. On the bright side, I’ve actually read more poetry books than usual this year. Among the ones I finished the year with was The Abridged History of Rainfall, by Jay Hopler (McSweeney’s Press), which is absolutely super. One poem in it, Elegy for the Living, is so heartbreakingly beautiful that I was compelled to read it aloud for the Twitterverse:

My unread book pile grew the other day when a friend emailed to ask if he had loaned me a book that he couldn’t find. He had not, but I’m pretty sure I own the book, and I thought, “If I can find it and have already read it, I can just pass it along to him”—an elegant solution to get him the book he wanted and clear one object out of my too-cluttered life, don’t you think?

You can probably tell already that this didn’t work out as planned.

I, too, found that I couldn’t track down this book, which for all I know might have decided to take a forbidden vacation with its sibling of the same name from my friend’s book collection.

But in the process of looking for it, I came across three other books that I had forgotten I had and really do want to read: two murder mysteries and Joe Biden’s book about the death of his son Beau, Promise Me, Dad. So those vaulted directly to the top of my next-read pile. The good news is that I’ve just finished reading one of them. Care to guess which one?

As we’re counting down the days to Inauguration Day 2021, and I’m looking forward to change in the White House—and, I hope, the country—it seemed appropriate to end 2020 with Biden’s memoir. I took the rediscovery of this book as a sign that the time was right to get to know my next president a little better. I’m glad I did. Although, of course, I cried at the end. So be forewarned.

Next up is one of the murder mysteries, a little lightness to start the new year.

My husband’s political advent calendar

Speaking of lightness, the new year, and the countdown to Inauguration Day…over on Escape into Life my husband, renowned cartoonist Phil Maish, has created a post-Christmas advent calendar to count down the last days of the current White House administration. Each day he opens a new door to show a new cartoon. Day 25 will be Inauguration Day.

Here’s yesterday’s cartoon, the most recent as I’m typing this but probably not the most recent as you’re reading. So here’s the growing archive of all open doors.

Ending the year on a high note

After the overnight snowstorm that revealed the deer tracks yesterday morning, we had an utterly gorgeous day today, sunny and clear and crisp. The husband and I took a nice walk, to and through a neighborhood park, and I couldn’t resist taking a few photos, including the one at the top of this post. It was a simply perfect winter day; I couldn’t have asked for a better one to end 2020. We’ll be spending our New Year’s Eve the way we like best: watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies and trying to stay awake until midnight. Tomorrow’s lentil soup is already made, and the traditional Swedish rice pudding will follow it up; if I recall correctly, we started 2020 without either of those good-luck staples, and look where that got us.

#frontstooppoetry by Kim Kishbaugh - Winter Storm Morning It felt rather good / to shovel off all the crap / of 2020 (Dec. 30, 2020)

Recipes new and old

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Today I’m reading cookbooks. I’m inspired by having just spent the last two weeks working my way through a fine book of food writing: The Reporter’s Kitchen: Essays by Jane Kramer. It doesn’t usually take me two weeks to read a book, but one of the hallmarks of good food writing is that I savor it rather than gobble it up voraciously.

I nibbled The Reporter’s Kitchen a chapter at a time, pausing often to menu plan, cook, bake, and borrow and read cookbooks. I have three borrowed cookbooks on Hoopla as a result, along with a list of dishes from Kramer’s own repertoire that I’m planning to find recipes for and try. Among these:

  • Parsnip and pear puree
  • Indian cornbread
  • Braised red cabbage

Those are all fall/winter foods, so it will be some time before I give them a try. In the meantime, I’ve been finding and experimenting with other new recipes, while also pulling out some of my standby favorites. My husband and I have feasted on all manner of simple delights in the last couple of weeks, including sautéed spinach both with and without pine nuts; pasta in many varieties, most often including grape and cherry tomatoes sautéed just long enough to start to wilt; pub burgers with mushrooms and black olives; fish with whatever seasonings seemed right; sesame noodles; a lovely salad of green beans, cucumbers and basil with lemon vinaigrette; slaws both new and old; apple cake; derby chocolate chip cookies; and no-bake peanut butter cookies.

Mom’s kitchen

Those no-bake peanut butter cookies

I’m working on (as in eating) some of those peanut butter cookies now, which means I’m thinking about my mother. This was one of her recipes, and I suspect it came from a peanut butter jar because I’ve come across at least one other person who was raised on exactly this same cookie but didn’t have the recipe from his mother and asked for mine. It’s dead simple with just six ingredients, and it’s the only cookie I make all summer long because…no baking. As I associate this with my mother, I suspect that my son and probably his friends will associate it with me.

Food traditions are a comfort to me. My mother’s and grandmother’s recipes call them to my mind, and recipes handed to me by friends never cease to summon memories of those friends when I make them. Holidays for me are interchangeable with the food I eat to celebrate them, and I think I would sooner skip Christmas entirely than celebrate it without my family’s traditional Swedish-based meal.

In general, my tastes in food differ vastly from my mother’s. I was raised on a diet of meat, potatoes, and vegetables cooked well beyond an inch of their lives. Aside from the vegetables, my mother was an excellent cook. But my adult tastes lean more toward pastas, rice, lighter (or no) meats, and steamed or grilled vegetables. I’ve inherited or retained my mother’s taste for fish, though, along with memories of standing next to her fishing along a riverbed. I’ve also inherited those recipes, some of which—her lentil soup, for example—I will enjoy till my dying day.

Hungry reading

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I just started reading a book of food writing, and all I can think about is food. I’ve only an introduction and one essay into The Reporter’s Kitchen, by Jane Kramer, and already I’ve made chicken salad, am planning dinner, and have borrowed two cookbooks from my library (thank you, Hoopla!).

Kramer is The New Yorker‘s European correspondent, but what’s important here is that she also has written about food over the years. The Reporter’s Kitchen is a compilation of those essays. I read The New Yorker only irregularly and wasn’t familiar with Kramer’s writing before this book caught my eye at the library (you know, back in the day when libraries were buildings you could walk into). So far I’m a fan. Even Kramer’s introductory essay had me starting to think about ingredients in my kitchen, and that might be the best response possible to food writing.

Tonight’s menu will take shape around some sort of pasta with tomatoes, kalamata olives, and probably green beans. I’m thinking about sautéed spinach on the side, and I also have an urge to bake. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.

Ground to table

I’m looking forward to a summer and fall filled with great cooking made possible by garden-fresh ingredients from the brand-spankin-new raised bed my husband just built for me. It’s 16 feet long and will hold everything from tomatoes and beans to cabbage and kalettes (aka kale sprouts). We took delivery of 4 cubic feet of soil this week and have spent the last three days moving it wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow into its new wood-framed home. I’m tired and a bit sore, but oh so happy I could write a poem.

Mineral-black soil,
Fertile, dark promise rich with
possibility

Or something like that. I’m reading a lot of poetry while sheltering in place, particularly after treating myself to a birthday purchase of books delivered direct to my door not by Amazon but by the distributor(s) for my local independent bookstore, which is able to continue bringing in income with this service while not able to open its doors. My order included three books of poetry, and I’m making my way through them slowly, savoring and re-reading.

My current obsession is The Madness Vase, by Andrea Gibson, one of my favorite poets. These poems are powerfully strong, anthems of survival shot through with vulnerability. They celebrate life without ever pulling punches, and I can’t get enough of them. That has been pretty much the case for me with every book of Gibson’s poetry I’ve ever picked up, and if you’ve never read any … well, I think you’re missing out.

I’ve seen Gibson in performance as well, and they’re equally powerful on stage. Here’s a collection of videos of their performances—don’t miss.

Non-fiction for the birds

Also included in my bookstore purchase was an enormous hardcover book, What It’s Like to Be a Bird, by David Allen Sibley. This one, too, is a joy, not meant to be read cover to cover but intended rather for wanderlust reading, choosing your own topic and following it wherever it takes you.

One place It took me was to my drawing pad, after reading about wings inspired to draw feathers of all varieties. I sense years of enjoyment ahead of me from this book, reading and re-reading, learning about different aspects of birds’ lives, reminding myself how and why they fascinate me.

Spring is a good time for reading about birds, when I also can sit on my front porch or back deck and watch them in the trees and at the feeders. That’s where I’m headed now, probably with a book.