The Crowded Bookshelf

I hadn’t given much thought to the impact or aftermath of a pandemic until I read Station Eleven. In Station Eleven a virus, the “Georgia Flu,” kills the majority of the world’s population within a few days. There’s no explanation, it just happened. Only pockets of human life remain. Author Emily St. John Mandel broaches the story in a creative way by intersecting multiple characters that are connected to one person, a Shakespearean actor named Arthur. In the first few pages, Arthur dies of a heart attack on stage while playing King Lear. At the same time, the Georgia Flu is taking hold and within days everything has changed forever. Mandel toggles in time between pre-pandemic days and twenty years after. The pandemic is referred to as “the collapse” of civilization where there is no electricity, no food and no running water. Roads are jammed with cars, inside are remnants of humans. All homes and buildings ransacked and deteriorating. Survivors travel by foot and some think they are the world’s sole survivor until one day they see footprints in the snow. Mandel paints a grim scene.

One character, Kirsten, is a child actor who made appearances in King Lear with Arthur and was witness to his heart attack. We get to know Kirsten twenty years after the collapse. She is in her late twenties and a Shakespearean actress in the Traveling Symphony, a band of twenty who perform symphonies and plays as they travel from settlement to settlement. Kirsten is obsessed with all things Arthur, especially a comic-book series written by Arthur’s ex-wife, Miranda.  The comic book features a character, Dr. Eleven, a physicist who lives on a space station, Station Eleven, after escaping an alien takeover of Earth. There is a parallel universe here that Kirsten understands but is never really developed.  Kirsten is tough and self-sufficient. She defends herself and others against The Prophet who is a cult leader taking pre-teen brides and training young boys to kill.

Another character is Clark who was Arthur’s best friend. The pandemic leaves Clark stranded in an airport where he lives for the rest of his life while building a Museum of Civilization that showcases pre-pandemic items such as cell phones, computers and credit cards. The Traveling Symphony is making its way to the airport which, after twenty years, has become a settlement of over 300 people. Clark and Kirsten meet but then the book ends.  Did they know that Arthur was a common connection between them?  I’m left with questions.  Who was that Prophet anyway?

As Mandel skillfully developed each of the characters in connection to Arthur, I had an expectation of a climactic event, a coming together. The end left me suspended.  Perhaps there’s a sequel? Regardless, I enjoyed reading this book, it’s a real page turner and perfect for a book club discussion.

See what the New York Times had to say about Station Eleven.

I’m probably the last person in Seattle to read this book.  Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown is a remarkable story of nine young men from the University of Washington who overcame all odds to win the 1936 Olympic gold medal in rowing.  Even though you know the end before you start reading, the book is compelling and exciting.  Throughout, Brown focuses on one crew member, Joe Rantz, whose early life was so challenging it’s implausible he would survive, let alone succeed.  His is a truly moving story.  The author interviewed Joe Rantz for this book shortly before he passed away in 2007.

An interesting element of the book is the context Brown provides on Germany in 1936 as Hitler was gaining momentum.  This was Hitler’s Olympics and the U.S. win over Germany was a particular affront to him.

I really enjoyed the gripping details Brown conjures out of the races that lead to the Olympic gold.  Each race is captivating.

This story is about inspiration and teamwork on a transcendent level.   It’s a must read.  The question is, why did it take over 70 years for this story to be told?

See what the Seattle Times had to say about Boys in the Boat.

Happy International Literacy Day!  OK, I’m one day late but I figure it’s never too late to celebrate literacy.

The International Literacy Day was declared by UNESCO in 1965 to place a global spotlight on the link between literacy and economic growth.  Approximately 775 million people worldwide are functionally illiterate, lacking the basic reading and writing skills to manage daily living and employment tasks.

The International Literacy Association (ILA) suggests taking the community approach to promote literacy.  They’re celebrating the day by sponsoring the Little Free Library® and  have created a toolkit to get you started on one of the hottest literacy movements today.  Little Free Library toolkit.

Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood.  One day I’ll build one myself.

Don’t miss this great opportunity to meet two very talented female artists and authors from the Pacific Northwest.

Carrie Browstein, musician and actress from Portland, will release her first book called Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl on October 27^th.   She’ll appear at the Neptune Theater in Seattle on November 6^th with Maria Semple, the famed Seattle author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette.

Check out Browstein’s book tour schedule.  More information  from the The Seattle Theater Group website:

From the guitarist of the pioneering band Sleater-Kinney, a candid, funny, and deeply personal look at making a life—and finding yourself—in music.

Before Carrie Brownstein became a music icon, she was a young girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest just as it was becoming the setting for one the most important movements in rock history. Seeking a sense of home and identity, she would discover both while moving from spectator to creator in experiencing the power and mystery of a live performance. With Sleater-Kinney, Brownstein and her bandmates rose to prominence in the burgeoning underground feminist punk-rock movement that would define music and pop culture in the 1990s. They would be cited as “America’s best rock band” by legendary music critic Greil Marcus for their defiant, exuberant brand of punk that resisted labels and limitations, and redefined notions of gender in rock.

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl is an intimate and revealing narrative of her escape from a turbulent family life into a world where music was the means toward self-invention, community, and rescue. Along the way, Brownstein chronicles the excitement and contradictions within the era’s flourishing and fiercely independent music subculture, including experiences that sowed the seeds for the observational satire of the popular television series Portlandia years later.

With deft, lucid prose Brownstein proves herself as formidable on the page as on the stage. Accessibly raw, honest and heartfelt, this book captures the experience of being a young woman, a born performer and an outsider, and ultimately finding one’s true calling through hard work, courage and the intoxicating power of rock and roll.

I’m looking forward to reading this one!

Author Susan Casey

Hey Seattlites, this is one you won’t want to miss!   Author Susan Casey will be reading from her latest book “Voices in the Ocean: A Journey Into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins,” at the Seattle Public Library’s Microsoft Auditorium on Monday, August 17, 2015, 7 – 8:30pm.

I haven’t read this book yet but here’s the scoop from B&N.

Barnes & Noble overview:

From Susan Casey, the New York Times bestselling author of The Wave and The Devil’s Teeth, a breathtaking journey through the extraordinary world of dolphins
 
Since the dawn of recorded history, humans have felt a kinship with the sleek and beautiful dolphin, an animal whose playfulness, sociability, and intelligence seem like an aquatic mirror of mankind. In recent decades, we have learned that dolphins recognize themselves in reflections, count, grieve, adorn themselves, feel despondent, rescue one another (and humans), deduce, infer, seduce, form cliques, throw tantrums, and call themselves by name. Scientists still don’t completely understand their incredibly sophisticated navigation and communication abilities, or their immensely complicated brains.
     While swimming off the coast of Maui, Susan Casey was surrounded by a pod of spinner dolphins. It was a profoundly transporting experience, and it inspired her to embark on a two-year global adventure to explore the nature of these remarkable beings and their complex relationship to humanity. Casey examines the career of the controversial John Lilly, the pioneer of modern dolphin studies whose work eventually led him down some very strange paths. She visits a community in Hawaii whose adherents believe dolphins are the key to spiritual enlightenment, travels to Ireland, where a dolphin named as “the world’s most loyal animal” has delighted tourists and locals for decades with his friendly antics, and consults with the world’s leading marine researchers, whose sense of wonder inspired by the dolphins they study increases the more they discover.
     Yet there is a dark side to our relationship with dolphins. They are the stars of a global multibillion-dollar captivity industry, whose money has fueled a sinister and lucrative trade in which dolphins are captured violently, then shipped and kept in brutal conditions. Casey’s investigation into this cruel underground takes her to the harrowing epicenter of the trade in the Solomon Islands, and to the Japanese town of Taiji, made famous by the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, where she chronicles the annual slaughter and sale of dolphins in its narrow bay.
     Casey ends her narrative on the island of Crete, where millennia-old frescoes and artwork document the great Minoan civilization, a culture which lived in harmony with dolphins, and whose example shows the way to a more enlightened coexistence with the natural world.
     No writer is better positioned to portray these magical creatures than Susan Casey, whose combination of personal reporting, intense scientific research, and evocative prose made The Wave and The Devil’s Teeth contemporary classics of writing about the sea. In Voices in the Ocean, she has written a thrilling book about the other intelligent life on the planet.