reading at the taverna

"Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

 Each summer I rent a house in a village in the foothills of the White Mountains in Crete. There is one bougainvillea-shaded taverna, which shares the village square with a tiny Byzantine chapel, decorated with magnificent 14th-century frescoes. I go there at lunchtime with a book. The taverna owner, Kostas, brings me whatever he's cooking, with beer. He lets me talk my lousy Greek. Cats snooze. Dogs lollop. The local farmers come and discuss the price of watermelons. I'm in heaven."

Dan Jones, "By the book," New York times book review, January 28, 2024.

Sounds perfect, Mr Jones.

cheatle

I'll admit it: I cheat at Artle, the art game from the National Gallery of Art. They show you four works in succession and you have to guess the artist. I do try but if I'm just blanking, I'll do a Google image search. Work number three today was intriguing, kind of Daliesque, fantastic surrealism.

The first and second works were very different and I should have guessed but work number three really threw me. It's one of the interesting early works from a federal competition by an artist whose mature works are significantly different.

Spoiler here: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.158369.html 

I justify my cheating by saying that Artle is a learning experience. The object pages are linked from the game as is the artist information page. Fortunately, Artle doesn't talk back to me or accuse me of cheating. One of my friends and colleagues at the NGA Library says she is involved with setting up Artle and I thank her every day.

When I'm done with Artle, I do Wordle and Globle. They (the famous they) say that little brain exercises are good for aging people, aka everybody.

The Diplomat

I have been bingeing The Diplomat and it is kind of scary. But then you check out the day's headlines in the New York Times and discover that the real world is just a whole lot too similar. Explosive events in the Middle East. Potential for nuclear options. Personal relationships getting tangled up. Ambition and revenge. Power hunger. Maybe I should go watch Barbie.
 

the books I read in 2023

The last book I finished in 2023 was The unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. I was in New York City for the New Year's weekend, catsitting at John's. John had shown me an article from Harper's on "Street Life" by Rachel Kushner from the August 2023 issue. I went to the film "All of Us Strangers" on New Year's Day. The book, the article, and the movie all circled, in their way, around the banality and disappointment and glory of everyday life and how big a role observation can play in how that works out. On the 30th, I was off galleryhopping at MoMA PS1 and ran into Janis, Sherri, Julie, and Hikmet in the Court Square subway station. I joined them in visiting the Tracey Emin and Donna Huanca shows at Faurschou in Greenpoint but then split off and went to the Whitney and LGBT Center before meeting Heidi and Dan for supper. All everyday and ordinary and glorious and, well, New York City.

The books I read this past year are listed here in chronological order of reading.

• The magician, by Colm Tóibín (2021)
• Harlem shuffle, by Colson Whitehead (2021)
• Flâneuse: women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, by Lauren Elkin (2017)
• Piazza Carignano, by Alain Elkann (1985) - bought at a used book store in Provincetown; the Carignano Palace in Turin was one of my favorite buildings on our 2018 trip to Turin, Milan, and Genoa; the book was fine but I really enjoyed the association with the building and plaza
• Driver's eduction, by Grant Ginder (2013) - this only gets 3.17 stars on Goodreads; that's why I don't pay too much attention to review stars; I really enjoyed this book and its style
• Germania: in wayward pursuit of the Germans and their history, by Simon Winder (2010) - one of a trilogy of histories of Middle Europe; I really enjoyed all three volumes (thanks, Daniel)
• Just by looking at him, by Ryan O'Connell (2022)
• Just mercy, by Bryan Stevenson (2014)
• Mrs Caliban, by Rachel Ingalls (1982)
• Radio girls, by Sarah-Jane Stratford (2016)
• Italian days: fifty things we know about life now, by Beppe Severgnini (2022)
• Danubia: a personal history of Habsburg Europe, by Simon Winder (2013)
• The art of description: world into word, by Mark Doty (2010) - it sounds like a book on cataloging ... but it's not, it is about words and putting them together
• The heart's invisible furies, by John Boyne (2017)
• The honey bus: the memory of loss, courage and a girl saved by bees, by Meredith May (2019)
• JD, by Mark Merlis (2015)
• Girl, woman, other, by Bernardine Evaristo (2019) - it took me a while to get used to the writing style but it worked: each sentence was a paragraph, not capitalized
• The library book, by Susan Orlean (2018)
• Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver (2018) - chomping at the bit, waiting for Demon Copperhead to come out in paper but did enjoy this one while waiting
• Becoming George Orwell: life and letters, legend and legacy, by John Rodden (2020)
• The promise, by Damon Galgut (2021)
• The poetics of cruising: queer visual culture from Whitman to Grindr, by Jack Parlett (2022)
• Solomon's crown, by Natasha Siegel (2023) - Richard the Lionheart and Philip Augustus, 12th century speculative fiction
• The address book: what street addresses reveal about identity, race, wealth, and power, by Dierdre Mask (2020)
• The last day: wrath, ruin, and reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, by Nicholas Shrady (2008)
• The personal librarian, by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray (2021) - fictionalized life of Belle da Costa Greene, longtime librarian for J.P. Morgan; it took me a while to get into it but I really enjoyed it once I hit the rhythm
• Every good boy does fine: a love story, in music lessons, by Jeremy Denk (2022) - maybe my favorite book of the year
• High-risk homosexual, by Edgar Gomez (2022)
• French braid, by Anne Tyler (2022)
• Dream cities: seven urban ideas that shape the world, by Wade Graham (2016)
• The unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce (2012)

I would not advise you against reading any of these books. I enjoyed some of them very much as I read them. Several of them resonated with places I have been or want to go. I bought several of them in Provincetown, over the years. Plenty of Rachels. As usual, about an even split of fiction and non-fiction. And now I've started reading Orwell's roses by Rebecca Solnit and find it thoughtful (no surprise because Solnit) and compelling.

If you want to see how Goodreads saw my year in reading, go to https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2023/6837039. There, you can click on book covers and see a summary of the book and how it is rated on Goodreads. I did read a note in one of my magazine newsletters that the author had given up on Goodreads (part of the Amazon empire) and was just using Google Sheets where she could add a column for author's gender if she wanted to. I would like a column for how I heard about a book. I know Carol recommended Orwell's roses.

Lady Moody's Gravesend

The Municipal Art Society announced a tour of Gravesend, in southern Brooklyn, and entitled it "Discovering Lady Moody's Gravesend." The announcement is illustrated with a picture of Trinity Tabernacle (above, screengrabbed from Google Street View). Lady Moody (born Deborah Dunch, married Sir Henry Moody) left England in 1639 where she was prosecuted for her Anabaptist beliefs. She settled in Saugus, Massachusetts, where she soon got in trouble with the established Puritan church. She moved on to Gravesend, Brooklyn, where she is the only European woman known to have founded a town in colonial America. The Dutch West India Company was more tolerant of religious dissent than the Puritans of Massachusetts. More detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Moody

The tabernacle grabbed my attention with its quirky massing and Gothic Revival details. I was further intrigued because my mother's family has paternal roots in Gravesend. Among Lady Moody's followers who joined her in Gravesend after she was excommunicated in Massachusetts was a Thomas Poling who had a son John Poling. John's son Samuel Poling married the granddaughter of Pieter Claesen Wyckoff, an early Dutch settler. The early Polings used various spellings of the surname, including Poland, Polen, and Polan. My mother's people had settled on Polan a few generations before hers.

I am not as obsessed with genealogy as some folks but I do enjoy the probable connections. Bunches of religious dissenters. My father's paternal ancestors come down through the Clarkes of Rhode Island.