My Favorite Maine Books

Here they are my favorite Maine books! While thinking about an upcoming vacation, I started the reminisce about time spent living there. My children were both born in Maine. What a beautiful state and you too can travel there in a book!

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Rachel Field's "Hitty" is one of my all time favorite children's books. It is the travel adventure of a doll through 100 years.

"Miss Rumphius" is another children's treasure from Barbara Cooney. It emphasizes to children their responsibilty to make the world more beautiful.

Robert McCloskey's simple tale "One Morning in Maine" is about Sally and her lost tooth. I read it numerous times to my children when they were around five and fascinated with loose teeth.

Linda Greenlaw in the nonfiction book "The Lobster Chronicles" talks about being female in the very male dominated profession of lobstering.

"Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy" is by Grand Rapids own Gary D. Schmidt. (No relation to me--Schmidt is a very common name!) It is a race relation book from 1912 in Phippsburg, Maine and nearby Malaga Island. The State takes the island from a poor community of interracial squatters. The story is aimed at middle schoolers and it was a "Newberry Honor Book" I loved this book and hope to get my soon to be middle schooler interested in it before we travel there.

"Charlotte's Web" speaks for itself . What a childhood treasure! E.B. White wrote the book in Maine.

Charlotte Agell was a favorite author of my daughter's when we lived in Maine. I read the season books numerous times. My copy of "I Swam with a Seal" is signed for Danielle. We went to a book signing while living there. Charlotte Agell still lives in midcoast Maine. Visit her at
www.charlotteagell.com

Memorial Day Weekend Reads

These are the three books I've plowed through recently. Two of them I felt a bit rushed on as I had an express 7 day check out from Herrick Library. I had been itching to read them though. I always feel like I've hit the jackpot when I come across a book I'd love to buy on that 7 day check out rack! "The Catcher in the Rye" speaks for itself. It showed up on my 15 year old daughter's summer reading list, so I dug a copy out of my stash and absorbed myself in the world of Holden Cualfield once again. The internet has made all reading so much fun! After reading "The Catcher in the Rye", I spent time looking and wondering what J.D. Salinger, the noted recluse, has been up to. I had forgotten that "The Catcher in the Rye" had played such a role in the shooting of John Lennon. From my limited research J.D. is still held up at 90 years old in New Hampshire. As my teenager watched the fervor of googling, she said I was an internet stalker! I'm just amazed how fast we can get information now--it doesn't mean I'll ever act on it. I just love asking questions that lead to more questions and seeing if my computer can take me there. I did have to tease her that perhaps on a planned vacation east this summer we should drive through J.D.'s New Hampsire town and see what's up? She thought that was a little creepy and I was only kidding. It was nice to visit with Holden Cualfield again. My perspective is so different as a mother not an adolescent. I found myself wondering at the parental philosophy that ships kids off to boarding school. I was obviously thankful that Holden still had his younger sibling Phoebe in his life. Siblings are so important as I hope my children some day realize.

It is kind of ironic that the other two books I read this weekend also have strong sibling connotations. "Run" deals with adoptions and sibling issues and "The Last Lecture" talks about childhood dreams. "Run" is fiction; "The Last Lecture" is a book about a Carnegie Mellon Professor who is dying and the lessons he wishes to leave to his three children.

I managed to make a trip on Memorial Day to visit my own two siblings. What a weekend!

The Aurora County All-Stars -Deborah Wiles

I bought this book at my daughter's school book fair a few weeks ago. I had read "Each Little Bird That Sings" by the same author a few years back so thought I'd give this one a try. By reading the jacket and looking at the picture, I knew I was in for a treat! The book combines baseball, Walt Whitman poetry, a drama queen and a pug dog! How perfect! House Jackson is the main character. He loves baseball, is motherless and reads to a dying neighbor while recovering from an injury. The book combines the fervor of a 12 year old boy, a girl named Frances (who prefers to be called Finesse) and the battle over which is more important a baseball game or a drama production. I loved it! I also thoroughly enjoyed her website/ blog entries and have copied a few of the gems below. Now -- maybe I can get my 11 year old to read it!


http://www.deborahwiles.com/


I took these quotes directly from Deborah Wiles website:

Blogging is how we are finding one another in this ever-bigger world, how we are discovering like voices and minds and hearts. I want to be a part of that discovery. So I'll write about what matters to me, and I'll keep looking for you, your voice, your mind, your heart. It's a symphony true, this searching, in whatever form it takes, as Walt Whitman wrote, as Norwood Boyd and Elizabeth Jackson said, as House Jackson learned. A symphony true:

After the dazzle of day is done
Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars
After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band,
Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.




Frederick Buechner:
"My story is important not because it is mine. . . but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track . . . of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity . . . that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally . . . to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but spiritually. I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human."

A Three Dog Life -Abigail Thomas

This book is a memoir which chronicles Abigail's life after her husband is hit by a car and suffers brain damage. I picked it up at the book store as the title caught my eye and I too am a dog lover. The cover had an endorsement by Stephen King which says, "The best memoir I have ever read. This book is a punch to the heart. Read It." Pretty heady stuff! I'm not a huge Stephen King fan, but his endoresement was spot on!

The book is written as little vignettes of the author's daily life. Each chapter has a different title and the book is not set up chronologically. The flow of dealing with a before and after story is all still there. I enjoyed her writing of the memoir more as moments. One of my favorite quotes from this book is : "Well, now I know I can control my tongue, my temper, and my appetites, but that's it. I have no effect on weather, traffic, or luck. I can't make good things happen. I can't keep anybody safe. I can't influence the future and I can't fix up the past.

What a relief."

Sometimes, I can't even control my tongue, my temper, or my appetite! It is a relief to realize that nothing else "controllable" is even on the radar screen of reasonableness.

www.AbigailThomas.net

What Now? - Ann Patchett

I have been a huge fan of Ann Patchett for a few years. My favorite book by her is "Bel Canto" This is a very small book that comes from a graduation speech which she gave at her alma mater Sarah Lawrence College. This is a book which I would highly recommend as a gift to any graduate this spring. A favorite quote from the book is "Sometimes the best we can hope for is to be graceful and brave in the face of all of the changes that will surely come. It also helps to have a sense of humor about your own fate, to not think that you alone are blessed when good fortune comes your way, or cursed when it passes you by. It helps if you can realize that this part of life when you don't know what's coming next is often the part that people look back on with the greatest affection." I was crying by the end of this book. Wonderful, Wonderful Writing!!

http://www.annpatchett.com/

Fire in the Heart - Deepak Chopra

I bought this book at my daughter's book fair to give to my teenager for her birthday. I think it is hard to develop spirituality in Holland. There is alot of religion in West Michigan, but not much spirituality. The book focuses on learning about your own uniqueness and appreciating this great gift of life. I really enjoyed the lesson of the rainbow. The teenager asks his spiritual advisor why a rainbow makes him feel good and the response is "Because life is meant to be sweet, and when you see something as sweet as a rainbow, it makes you remember that."

I had never read anything by Deepak Chopra before, but I know that he has a huge following www.chopra.com

Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh by Helena Norberg-Hodge

My Friend Yvette loaned me this book. It was publiushed by the Sierra Club in 1991. When I first glanced through the book, I thought wow 1991 was before the explosion of the world wide web how must this "ancient culture" look now? I wasn't sure I would get much out of the book, but it is a wonderful study in sociology. It reminds me a bit of the more recent book called "Three Cups of Tea" which I read last summer. The theme of both books is that western culture and "development" are not necessarily the best way. The book "Three Cups of Tea" has a focus on education of children along western idealogies. Along the way, the author learns from the local people about the benefits to a slower pace of life. This book, Ancient Futures, focus is that we have much to learn from the way things used to be done. There was very little waste by the Ladakh people until they started to "modernize" their facilities. Interdependence was valued, but with the new more wetern ways independence became important. With the culture changes, problems of the west crept in such as depression and isolation.

One of the first things I thought of upon reading this book, was the stories about the Tsunami several years ago that killed so many people. Some of the more indiginous "boat" people in those areas were able to remain safe from the Tsunami as they had a vast culural knowledge of the phenomenon as it was occurring. I guess this was an extreme case of what happens to culture when the relationship to the environment and a respect of nature is lost. It also made me think of all of the "development" according to western standards that are happening in China today. How much of China's ancient ways will be lost in an attempt to modernize?

Closer to home, this book is a reminder to all of us to slow down and appreciate relationships with humans and the earth for what they are--life sustaining.