Where the Books Went

The books had become a burden.

That’s not a sentence I would ever have dreamed of writing when I was younger. “Younger” meaning eighteen months ago. Until recently, I went around saying things like “There’s no such thing as too many books, only too little time in which to read them.” I declared I would measure my coffin according to the number of volumes I could squeeze inside its piney confines. Part with my books? You might as well cut my arm off with a rusty saw.

And yet, the timbers of my Craftsman home in Butte, Montana groaned under the weight of paper and ink. The shelves lining the walls of my basement had long since been filled, and over-filled—like a corpulent guest at Thanksgiving dinner who, after the turkey and the stuffing and the sweet potatoes and the cranberry sauce and the gravy, greedily cuts just One More Slice of Pumpkin Pie. With whipped cream.

The books were every-frickin-where in the 4,000-square-foot house: there were piles in the bathroom, stacks in the breakfast nook, and a haphazard litter of titles to be shelved weighing down the polished-wood bar in the basement. My collection, which had been built and curated over the past thirty years of my life, was out of control. It was the literary version of The Trouble with Tribbles.

Books came into the house, but none went out. I was saturated and oversaturated. By my estimate, and according to my Library Thing catalog, my shelves were stuffed with more than 13,000 books. The real “trouble,” of course was the fact that I could not stop buying books. I am, I guess, part magpie: I cannot resist a new, shiny object. I was a bookaholic in much the same way that many people struggle with grape and grain; I had to start avoiding bookstores like twelve-steppers vow never to step foot inside a bar again. As an author who frequently goes on book tours, this was impossible. But I tried to control myself. I tried, I really tried.

And failed.

It was a slowly-dawning awareness, but eventually, I reached—and passed—my breaking point. Long ago, I had crossed the line when I had more books than I could possibly read in my lifetime (in truth, more books than the most secluded hermit could ever read). A speed-reading course wouldn’t even make a difference. The tipping point came when my wife and I made the decision to put the house on the market and move into smaller quarters. The original plan was to live in our new 25-foot RV. We would travel the country and Live Small. We’ve since tapped the brakes on that idea—not entirely ruling it out, but not committing to that miniaturized lifestyle, either. (Plus, the house in Butte still hasn’t sold, so we’re biding our time here in Montana for now.) We had an estate sale and sold more than 80 percent of our worldly goods; we’re now living in this oversized house with just a sofa, a bed, two nightstands, and just a few sticks of furniture. Our three cats spend their days chasing dust bunnies and listening to the echoes of their meows bounce off the bare hardwood floors. (And no, before you ask, we’re not marching to the beat of Marie Kondo and all those decluttering books which currently clutter the aisles of bookstores; this is a long-brewing, personal decision which has nothing to do with popular trends.)

Everything, from the camcorder bought in 2010 to the massive antique wardrobe in the upstairs bedroom, was sold. If my wife could part with her pewter salt-and-pepper shaker collection, I knew I, too, needed to make my own hard sacrifices. The books had to go. But where?

For the past year, I had been carting fat bookbags to Second Edition Books in Butte where the owner, Ann, bought somewhere around 1,000 books (and God bless her for her generosity and patience with my bi-weekly trips into her store where I continually ask, like a scratched record, “Can you take any more off my hands?”).

But off-loading at the used bookstore was just one slice of the Thanksgiving-feast pie. After separating out the ones I wanted to keep—

[Oh, excuse me, did you think I would get rid of all the books? If so, you obviously don’t know me. It was an emotionally-difficult culling process, but I picked and I chose, I sorted and set aside, I boxed and then unboxed and re-boxed indecisively. Eventually, I preserved about 1,000 of my most treasured volumes. I kept all of the Flannery O’Connor; ditto with Dickens, Hemingway, Richard Brautigan, Lewis Nordan (you can have my Nordan collection when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers) and Raymond Carver, along with a handful of my favorite living authors—though I won’t name names to avoid any hurt feelings from someone who didn’t make the cut. I saved my Dell mapbacks collection and my Big Littles. I held on to a small shelf of beloved children’s books. I kept my Penguin Classics and all my Library of America volumes.]

The survivors of the Great Book Culling of 2019

I carried The Keepers to an upstairs bedroom and though they lined an entire wall, removing them from the basement only made a minor dent in the overall collection. How, and where, could I possibly unload a lifetime’s worth of books? The answer came in the most unexpected of ways.

My friend Christine Martin, board director of the local non-profit organization The Root and Bloom Collective, was at my house in late summer to buy several of my bookcases (the ones which had been recently emptied of their contents) and, knowing of my book “burden,” she looked at the rows and rows of spines and said, “You know, we might be interested in buying some of these from you...”

“We?” I said.

“The Root and Bloom. We’re in the early stages of building our own library and some of these books would make a good start for what we want to do.”

“Some?” I said, teasingly (but also seriously). “What about all? Would you be willing to take all of them?”

“Oh.” She stared at the two hundred tons of paper, ink and glue. “Well....Let me talk to our board and directors and see what they say.”

*     *     *

They said yes.

And so, the next week Christine returned with empty boxes and a few volunteers from the Root and Bloom to help pack what she later estimated were 180 boxes. “No one had to go to the gym that week,” she told the local TV news station.

For several days, the basement of my house was noisy with the rumble of heavy books dropping into cardboard boxes and the shrieks of packing tape sealing the flaps. Christine and her small army, the Book Brigade, arrived early each day and spent hours pulling, sorting, and cramming. I popped in on my lunch hour to check on their progress and I always went away feeling a little bad: my burden had become their burden. The sheer number of books was overwhelming and I felt sorry for the Book Brigade and their sweat-damp faces and sore muscles.

But eventually, everything was boxed up and carted off. I felt only relief.

That soon turned to joy when Christine told me of her plans for the books: “These will be the start of a new library we’re establishing at the Jacobs House. We’re going to call it the Edwin C. Dobb Memorial Peace Library.”

I had to turn away for a minute. Suddenly, there was a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes.

*     *    *

Before his all-too-soon death this past July, Ed Dobb was one of the best word-slingers to ever come out of Butte, Montana. His articles about the troubled history of this copper-mining town, “Pennies From Hell” and “Dirty Old Town,” are revered as masterpieces of journalism; they’re the yardstick against which everything else written about Butte is measured. Ed was also the co-producer of the terrific documentary film Butte, America. The blood that flowed through Ed’s veins was the color of pennies.

Ed emailed me out of the blue one day in 2010, one year after I’d moved to the Mining City and shortly after my interview with Tom McGuane appeared in New West magazine. The subject line of the email was “Comparing Pens” and it opened like this:

Hey, David, I enjoyed your interview with McGuane in New West. Also noted with delight that you’re living in Butte. Clearly you’re mad....What sort of unspeakable crimes would condemn you to such a desolate place?....Doubtless you’ve now heard the old joke: One of the best things about living in Butte is that Montana is close by. I think how a person responds to the quirky, often forbidding island ruin of Butte says a lot about a person’s character and sensibility.

I leaned closer to my laptop screen. I’d found a kindred spirit, someone who removed his rose-colored glasses before sweeping his eyes across the scraped and scarred landscape of this town. Ed loved Butte, but he also understood its complexities: the ugly and the lovely.

Ed sent me more essays to read, including this one about cold-water swimming which began:

Although I had been swimming on and off since moving from southwest Montana back to San Francisco in mid-January, my new season officially started on April 17th, the day I turned 60. It was a bright afternoon, the sun partially obscured by high thin clouds, gusts churning the surface of Aquatic Park, a manmade cove bounded by curved piers on the waterfront. That’s where I swim, along with others whose notion of a swell time is plying chilly San Francisco Bay while wearing nothing but a cap and a Speedo. And chilly it was that day—water about 55 degrees, or 30 degrees cooler than the average municipal pool. Whatever pleasures await the cold-water sea swimmer—and they are incomparable, even, at times, transcendent—reaching them entails a certain amount of discomfort. Every swim begins with a double leap—the physical act of plunging into the water, the mental act of deliberately submitting to pain.

Going back over that article now, half a year after Ed died at 69 of complications from a heart condition, I read it as metaphor. Ed was writing about swimming, yes; but—and I hope he’ll forgive me for stretching his words—he could easily have been writing about the process of shedding my beloved books: the icy shock of the decision to rid myself of what I’d once held so dear, deliberately subjecting myself to the pain of loss.

But now, as Christine told me of Root and Bloom’s plan for the books, I realized it wasn’t loss and grief I should be feeling, but happiness and comfort. My 30-year library would have a new life and find new readers and, best of all, it would carry my friend’s name and legacy with it into the future. I couldn’t have planned a better fate for the books.

*     *    *

Two months after the last box was packed and carried out the front door, I paid my books—my former books—a visit at the Jacobs House. Many of them were still in their cartons, stacked like a small mountain range in the middle of the floor; but enough had made their way onto the shelves—my old bookcases—for me to browse. I tilted my head and ran my eyes across the familiar spines. “Hello, old friends,” I whispered. “It’s good to see you again.”

I restrained myself: I did not shake the shelves and sweep the books into my arms and carry them out the door. Instead I felt a pang of guilt for holding them in a miser’s grip for all those years, knowing I could never read even a fraction of the collection—no, not even a snowflake on the tip of the iceberg’s worth—before I died. Now, other visitors to the Edwin C. Dobb Memorial Peace Library would have the chance to read what I built and saved over the decades.

I went back to Ed Dobb’s article on swimming in the icy waters near Alcatraz and his words took on fresh meaning:

How long it takes for the body’s internal heat to counteract the penetrating cold varies widely, depending on several factors—metabolism, conditioning, overall acclimation, how hard one swims. But whether the interim is measured in seconds or minutes, a kind of alchemy is at work, converting the forbidding into the ecstatic. What makes the shift possible is conviction, the belief that eventually the sting will recede, the shock replaced by something that cannot be experienced anywhere else.

What I once feared most—losing my books—had been converted to joy. A new refrain ran through my head: It is better to share than to hoard.

I was at peace with my loss.

Ed Dobb swimming toward Alcatraz

1,000 Books: Don Quixote in Iraq

Don Quixote. In particular, this Modern Library edition, standing vigil today over my old battle-dress uniform. Oh, the memories of this book! Not necessarily the contents (though they are all well and good), but the experience of reading Don Quixote. Even now, nearly 15 years later, I can recall the stone-heavy feel of that sand-colored book in my hand. I remember the way it led my mind through the forest to the edge of an open meadow and said, “Run free!”

Like the day Reagan was shot and the morning the space shuttle exploded, I remember where I was when I met Don Quixote for the first time: in Iraq with the rattle-pop of gunfire less than two miles away.

It was the first of the major works of classic literature I set out to read during my year-long deployment to Iraq as an active-duty soldier in 2005. After my 14-hour work days in the public affairs office of Task Force Baghdad headquarters, I had nothing else to do but eat, sleep and read. This would be my “Desert Island Year” for books. I had brought an additional foot locker with me to Iraq, over and above my unit’s packing list. It was boulder-heavy with nothing but books. In one sense, I had loaded the canon.

All my life, Don Quixote had been one of those dauntingly-massive books I knew I should read, but never had—along with Ulysses, Proust and the Bible in toto. Frankly, in 2005, I found the expanse of desert and the expanse of time were the perfect marriage of conditions in which to crack open Cervantes. I revved into high gear and plowed (happily, happily) through the endless field of words. I made it to the windmills; I never made it to Bloomsday.

This morning, I recall my time spent with Cervantes in Baghdad as I continue my journey through James Mustich’s landmark volume of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. Today’s featured book is, of course, the 1605 and 1615 novel by Cervantes (it was published in two parts) and it deservedly receives a full three-page treatment in 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. I highly recommend what Mr. Mustich has to say about Cervantes (as well as Shakespeare and Montaigne) in this essay: “Cervantes made fiction itself a tool of inquiry, letting stories intersect, interrupt, and reimagine each other in the lives of his characters—much as they do, really, in the course of our lives. He uncovered a new world for human endeavor as surely as the seagoing stalwarts of his time explored new continents.”

Reading James Mustich on reading Don Quixote immediately sent me down Sentimental Street (which intersects Memory Lane at Epiphany Square), and this ultimately led me back to the raw pages of my wartime journal. A couple of times, my reading of Don Quixote pivoted into some interesting real-life scenes, so I thought I would share those with you. This first entry begins with Don Quixote and ends with a full-scale enemy attack on our Forward Operating Base. Along the way, a pope dies....

Not Cervantes. Dickens, I think.
But this is a nice view of my reading room (which was also my living room, dining room & bedroom)

April 2, 2005: We are stretched thin over here. So, every now and then, even as a senior non-commissioned officer, I have to do some extracurricular work (known as “pulling a detail”), since I’m so strapped for soldiers. Today, I’m sitting in the Internet Cafe, monitoring the computer users—making sure people are able to get on to the sites they need to and that if there’s a great demand for seats that people move along after they’ve been online for their allotted 30 minutes. There are 18 stations in the place but only 14 of them work. Every two hours, all the computers lock up and I must tell everyone to save what they’re working on, then go push a blue switch on the surge protector and re-set the server. No, not tough duty at all. It’s actually a nice break to be able to sit in here and surf the internet and read my book. Today, I’m starting Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It’s a huge undertaking and this deployment might be the only time I’ll actually be able to find time to read it. The first part of DQ, though, is boring. I scrape the edge of the remaining 900 pages with my fingernail, trying to loosen the dirt underneath. I tilt back in my metal folding chair and prop the book on my knee. I want everyone in the room to see what I’m reading. Yeah, proud to be a bookworm.

I was talking to a guy here today who was going on and on about how we were stuck here for 18 months, but he didn’t see the sense of it. “The Iraqi Army’s got, what, 14 battalions and an entire brigade! That’s more than we’ve got.”

“True,” I said, “but I think it’s the quality not the quantity that everyone’s concerned about.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said. “Once we leave here, what’s going to happen? They’re gonna try our little democracy experiment for a while and when that doesn’t work, they’ll go back to the way they always did business for the last 30,000 years. Eventually, it’s going to dissolve into a civil war and some dictator guy will rise to power and they’ll be right back where they started from.”

In the afternoon, three Iraqis come in to work on the computers. Two of the men are bandaged—one guy has both arms in slings (he must do everything with his elbows or grunt at his co-workers to push buttons), the other one has a bandage wrapped around his head like a turban. There is a nasty-looking peninsula of blood on his forehead descending from beneath the wrap. He keeps dabbing at it with a handkerchief.

The Iraqis hang around for three hours, loading software, reconfiguring the “down” computers and generally doing lots of unplugging and re-plugging of power cords in an effort to get everything working. Fifteen minutes after they leave, everyone starts rapidly clicking on their mice and banging on their keyboards and groaning at the fact that everything’s locked up again. So, I fix it with another push of the blue button.

The Pope dies this evening. Around that same time, 60 insurgents assault Abu Ghraib prison from several different directions, simultaneously ramming suicide car bombs at the front and rear gates, and firing rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s at the U.S. soldiers and Marines guarding the place.

The Internet Café shudders twice from the car bombs and it’s not until later that we realize it wasn’t a controlled detonation by one of our EOD teams. This is the real deal—a raging battle taking place right outside our gates (Abu Ghraib borders Camp Liberty). This was the Holy Shit! moment of my deployment.

A short while later, a soldier bursts into the trailer and tells everyone that the new uniform is flak vest and Kevlar helmet from now until 7 a.m. due to the heightened security. Later, after I close up the Internet Café and return to my trailer, I venture out for a shower. I feel silly wearing my tennis shoes, PT shirt and shorts and a flak vest and Kevlar, but at the same time I’m grateful this isn’t something we have to wear every day, like I’d been dreading before I arrived.

The next morning, the Pope is still dead and at Abu Ghraib the enemy insurgents have limped home, thoroughly defeated by the U.S. forces. We don’t know how many we killed, but we only sustained about 20 wounded, and only two or three of those were serious injuries. Still, it gives me pause to think about how well-coordinated the attack was. We can’t underestimate the enemy.

This is what Reuter’s reported the next day: Al Qaeda’s wing in Iraq said on Sunday seven suicide bombers spearheaded its brazen overnight raid on Abu Ghraib prison that wounded 44 U.S. soldiers. In a statement on Saturday’s raid on the notorious facility outside Baghdad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s group said its fighters killed “dozens of Americans,” destroyed more than 15 vehicles and shot down an Apache helicopter, It said 57 fighters attacked watchtowers from four sides and “silenced them” as seven suicide bombers detonated vehicles laden with explosives around the facility, “Three martyrs were ... (killed) while infiltrating the infidels’ fortresses, and seven other martyrdom seekers went to heaven after they blew up the enemy...” said the statement posted on a Web site used by Islamists.

This, of course, was all bullshit.

They have doused most of the lights around camp now—for security reasons, I suppose—so it’s blind-black walking around the gravel and between the trailers. The moon is nothing but a toenail clipping. Tonight, walking back to my room in my PTs and flak vest, I heard a couple of unseen soldiers talking to each other while sitting at a picnic table in the dark.

One said: “You don’t think they’d ever try to attack this place, do you?”

Silence from the other guy.

“Well, do you?”

After a long pause, his companion answered, “Hard to say.”

June 6, 2005: Last night, while sitting on the edge of my bed reading Don Quixote, I suddenly felt the urge to start clearing my throat. Then I noticed it was getting harder to breathe, as if the air was thickening. I got up, opened my door, and was met with a wall of brown—pure brown air. It was a dust blizzard. I couldn’t even see the other trailers fifteen feet away from mine. At some point while I was deep in Cervantes, the wind had kicked up, stirring all the talcum-powder dirt around here. Now it was filtering through the vents in my air conditioning and laying a fine, powdery grit over everything in my room, starting with my nose and throat. I turned off my air conditioner and tried to go to sleep. But I woke up two hours later, burning up with the stifling heat of the heavy night air. I turned on the air conditioner, figuring I’d take my chances with the dust storm. In the morning, my throat was raspy and there was mucus flaking in the hollows of my eyes.

I hope this doesn’t last. It’s putting a damper on everything here on the Forward Operating Base. Everyone is going around clearing their throats and rubbing their eyes. Like we’re all grief-stricken and trying to hide it.

June 16, 2005: Yesterday, I turned the final, 1000th page of Don Quixote. What a journey it was, what a wonderful odyssey. Truth be told, the book only came along with me on this deployment because it got swept into the duffel bag along with a load of other classics. At the time, it was pretty far down on my list of priorities. But six weeks ago, as it sat there on my shelf, thick as a tree stump, something moved me to pick it up and crack it open. I was hooked from the start (....okay, after I got over the initial speed bump of the preface and royal certifications and printer’s edicts—the boring stuff). I don’t have the energy or the time here in this scribbled journal to delve into everything I loved about this book (I will say this: the sidekick Sancho Panza turns out to be infinitely more interesting than DQ). Suffice to say, it’s a buoyant narrative that also parodies writing and publishing. It’s must-reading for anyone serious about pursuing this lovely and damned profession of writing (and reading).

So, after DQ, I’m left somewhat bereft. What next? Knowing that nothing could begin to approach the thousand-page journey, I decided to pick up something new and light: the 128-page Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara. Very disappointing. If Don Quixote was a feast of prime rib and lobster, then this little book was a bag of Skittles. If you’re in the mood for a poorly-written and ultimately meaningless novel about sex, booze and body piercing in contemporary Japan, then by all means grab this little Zirconium diamond. Otherwise, re-read Don Quixote.

Now, it’s time to turn my attention back to Charles Dickens. American Notes is next.

*     *     *

You can read more about my wartime reading habits HERE

Living With My Books: A Bookseller’s Library

Reader:  Barbara Theroux
Location:  Missoula, Montana
Collection Size:  Averages 2,000.  It’s a fluid collection: books come in and are donated to grandchildren, the university, and the Missoula Public Library.
The one book I'd run back into a burning building to rescue:  It’s actually four books. Two books “created and bound” by my sons when they were in third grade and two journals created on trips to Disneyland in 1982 and The East Coast in 1984
Favorite book from childhood:  Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
Guilty pleasure book:  As a bookseller, there were several customers that would always request “airplane reading” those books that you can escape into on a flight, my suggestions were always mysteries. Guess I have Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie to thank for that reading tradition. Joe Pickett, Walt Longmire, Sean Stranahan, Erin Murphy, and Lola Wicks are current characters that give me pleasure.

I have been surrounded by books all my life. In the 1950s, Little Golden Books were the beginning of my personal library; my mother could buy these treasures at the grocery store. As a librarian she knew the importance of reading to children. Not only were books in our home, but I had my own books and bookshelf. Early books that I purchased with my own money at Woolworth’s were in the popular series titles featuring Donna Parker, Trixie Belden, and Nancy Drew.

Libraries were also an important part of my childhood, especially useful to explore topics of interest like ship disasters. One summer I went through the pages of history as I read about the Titanic, the Andrea Doria, and the Lusitania. With library books I did not have to clear room on my bookshelves, but I did have a special spot to keep them so that I did not forget to return them on time. I continued to work in and volunteer in school and public libraries all my life. Today I am president of Friends of Missoula Public Library and have served on many committees working on the new library.

In the late 1960s, my summer employer was Doubleday and Co. The publisher had a bindery and shipping center in my hometown of Hanover, Pennsylvania. This was the center of The Literary Guild and various other book clubs. Working on the assembly lines, gave me insight into how a book is made. It also gave me incentive to complete my college education. At least once a month, employees could purchase damaged books for twenty-five cents apiece. Many times I came home from work with a backseat full of current books.

I graduated with an education degree with a school library certification. This took me to a junior high school library in Pendleton, Oregon. From there I moved to Moscow, Idaho, and went to work in the public library. In 1971, I accepted a position as trade book buyer at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Being a book buyer at two university stores and later a bookstore owner gave me an introduction to another side of the book business. One full of catalogs, advance reading copies and opportunities to meet authors (and add signed books to my personal library). The decades of bookselling greatly increased my personal library and started my sons’ libraries as well.

This bookshelf holds some of my favorite titles. There is even one Doubleday damaged book, Five Smooth Stones, among the advanced reading copies, signed copies and many Montana Book Award titles.

In addition to acquiring books throughout my life, I had to learn to downsize my collection. Over the years I have donated to various library book sales, the University of Montana President’s home library, established home libraries for my grandchildren, and added to Little Free Libraries at my apartment and across town. My bookshelves also display travel mementos, family photographs and other collections. I now life in a 750-square-foot double-loft apartment where my books surround me but still allow room to entertain friends, family and occasionally host a book club.

This built-in piece of furniture provides a good place to house some of my signed editions.

My travel bookcase not only contains travel guides and books from destinations, but a collection of photos and empty beverage containers from most of the countries I have visited. My travels have taken me to Romania, Hungary, Korea, Russia, China, Cuba and Kenya. The Kenyan kiondo holds a collection of books by Kenyan authors and those which are set in Kenya. One of my sons was in the Peace Corps and spent three years teaching in Kenya where he met his wife. I have traveled to Kenya several times and love having family to visit there.

Now that I am retired from bookselling, I still purchase books and obtain advance reading copies for the next phase of my life with books, becoming a blogger. Book Bound with Barbara began one year ago and is evolving (which is a polite way to say I am still exploring how I want to talk about books).

My office (above) and reading corner (below) show stacks of books, some divided into month of publication or category such as young adult. It is an ever-changing landscape!

Barbara Theroux retired in 2017, giving her time to read the books she accumulated over the 45 years of bookselling. In 1986, she opened Fact & Fiction in downtown Missoula, giving her many years of book events, customers, authors and experiences in creative bill-paying. She still volunteers with the Montana Book Festival, Montana Book Award, and the Missoula Public Library but loves to travel especially to see her grandchildren. These days her opinions can be found at BookBoundWithBarbara.blogspot.com

My Library is an intimate look at personal book collections.  Readers are encouraged to send high-resolution photos of their home libraries or bookshelves, along with a description of particular shelving challenges, quirks in sorting (alphabetically? by color?), number of books in the collection, and particular titles which are in the To-Be-Read pile.  Email thequiveringpen@gmail.com for more information.

My First Time: Kris Faatz

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today’s guest is Kris Faatz (rhymes with skates), a pianist, writer, and teacher. Her first novel, To Love A Stranger, was a finalist for the 2016 Schaffner Press Music in Literature Award and was published in May from Blue Moon Publishers (Toronto). To Love a Stranger was inspired by Kris’s work as a professional musician and is set in the backstage world of the classical symphony. Kris’s short fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Potomac Review, Glassworks, Reed, Bluestem, and Luna Station Quarterly, among other journals. She lives in Maryland with her husband and feline contingent, and when not writing or music-making, can often be found hiking and exploring the outdoors. Visit her online, and check out her Storytelling and Sound blog on the links between writing and music, at https://krisfaatz.com.

The First Book That Anchored Me

The summer before I started sixth grade, I first read Watership Down. Bits and pieces of the rest of that summer hang around in my memory: a day of camp here, a sleepover with my best friend there. Everything else, though, boils down to the story and the place where I read it: my grandparents’ house in the Pocono Mountains.

My grandparents lived in Berwick, Pennsylvania, a small town that sits on the bank of the Susquehanna River and looks across at an even smaller town called Nescopeck. If you go there, and drive into town across the concrete span that used to be a railroad bridge, you’ll probably think this is Anyplace, America.

From the outside, you would be right. If you had been a kid there, though, you would know a few other things. For instance, you would know that the sunlight up in the mountains is daffodil-yellow and as sweet as water. You would know that they don’t make the same kind of air anywhere else. It’s so crisp and clear that it should glitter. You would also know practical things, like the fact that Dalo’s Bakery on Freas Avenue makes the crustiest torpedo rolls and the softest, sweetest raisin-filled cookies. You’d know that if you want to watch a sunset, you should go up to the lake in the northwestern corner of town, and while you’re there you should toss crumbs for the little sunfish. If you had been a kid in Berwick, you would know, too, that the brick-walled library in town must be bigger on the inside than the outside, because any book you want is hidden somewhere in its maze of wooden shelves.

The summer before sixth grade, I found Watership Down in that library. I checked it out, took it back to my grandparents’ house, and for the next four days I parked myself in my grandparents’ living room, with the tick of the grandfather clock on the wall to keep me company, and ate, breathed and slept words.

I can’t say that summer was when I decided to be a writer. I didn’t settle on that for another twenty years or more, but that story took hold of me as no other ever had. When the summer ended, the story came back to school with me. It followed me along the shadowy floor-polish-smelling corridors of the junior high building–new territory for the new sixth grader–and infused itself into math problems and Spanish sentences. It came to my piano lessons with me and slipped into the music I played. It was the dialogue behind J. S. Bach’s Invention in A Major, and it was the angry heartbeat of Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor.

Junior high is the part of school that most of us remember as “thank God it’s over.” Somehow, even the popular kids weren’t having fun (though they didn’t let the rest of us in on that secret until years later). I was quiet and different, too much in love with books and classical piano music to belong anywhere. Watership Down became an anchor for me. Through it, I learned that stories could have a kind of power I had never imagined.

I also learned about the power and authority of the storyteller. If you’ve read the book, you might remember Dandelion, the warren’s own storyteller, the keeper of his people’s history and, often, the source of their courage. I saw what he did inside the story, and I saw what the writer did outside it. Without meaning to, I found myself imitating the way Richard Adams wrote: the gentle voice, the depth of detail, the meditative, immersive tone. I didn’t know anything about him other than the book he had written, but for me, he was a hero.

Fast-forward twenty-some years. My own first book, To Love A Stranger, came out in May 2017. I found my wonderful publisher, Blue Moon Publishers in Toronto, on my own, after much trying and giving up and trying again. (About that process: “thank God it’s over.”) But I think my eleven-year-old self would be proud, because whatever else she thought about doing with her life, she always knew that having her own name on a book cover would be the height of cool. To me, this milestone feels like taking a place at the table with the writers I love. Richard Adams, for instance, is up at the head of the table, and I’m a newbie at the foot, but we can sit there together.

When I started writing my novel, close to ten years ago, I didn’t have Watership Down or Berwick in mind. I meant to tell a story about a character who had become so loud and insistent in my head that I had to try to put him on paper. I also wanted to send a shout-out to classical music, because by then I was a professional pianist and knew how increasingly tough it was for that art to find an audience.

Berwick, though, had other plans. My character needed a hometown, and soon enough, fictional Westbury looked like a place I knew. The Weis Market had become an A&P, and the Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary was now St. Francis. I knew, though, exactly how the air in that place tasted and what the sunlight looked like. I knew that the majority of Westbury’s people had roots in Eastern Europe, like my grandparents did, and that they spoke with the unmistakable twang that belonged to the Pennsylvania mountains.

I wish I could show you things about Berwick that are gone. My grandparents had a crabapple tree in their front yard. The next owners cut the tree down, but I remember my grandmother’s crabapple jelly, which tasted as rosy-rich as its color. On Front Street, there used to be a store called Mulberry’s. It had wooden floors and crowded aisles stuffed with bins of fabrics, beads, and all kids of dried flowers. A few blocks away from my grandparents’ house, there was a place called Will-a-Mett Farm, where they made their own ice cream and where–I think–I first petted a cat. (It was patient.)

These days, Berwick is more Anyplace than it used to be. People don’t have the same accent. The sunlight looks about like it does anywhere else. The place as I remember it is now only in my head, but stories–and storytellers–have power.

Berwick was not the engine that drove my novel, but I’m glad to have put a piece of my memories into my first book. In my words, I send out seeds of the place I loved. In other imaginations, those seeds might grow.

Had a Great Time, Wish You Were There

Miss me? Wondered where I'd gone? Or perhaps you never noticed The Quivering Pen was off the airwaves for the better part of two months (hey, I have no illusions this blog is smaller than a pimple on a gnat's cheek when it comes to the Important Things in Life).

My apologies for the unexplained disappearance of The Quivering Pen whose content dried up in the middle of April. A variety of factors managed to put the blog in a coma:

1.  I got very busy at The Day Job.
2.  My laptop computer died.
3.  I took a trip to Europe.

I couldn't do much about #1, I recently resolved #2 (kisses and hugs to the new MacBook Air), and I'd already sort of planned to be off the grid during #3. But yeah, I could have left a note saying I'd just stepped out and would be back soon.

Content will soon be flowing once again at the Pen, but in the meantime, I thought I'd share some photos I took during the joyous, unplugged two weeks of #3.

Late last week, my wife Jean and I returned from a long float down the Danube, Main, and Rhine Rivers aboard the Viking River Cruises' longship Mimir, traveling from Budapest to Amsterdam. This was only my second visit to Europe. The last time was in 1976 when I took a high-school trip to London, Paris, Rome and Switzerland. I'd never been anywhere near Hungary, Austria, Germany or The Netherlands (a brief layover in a German airport en route to Iraq in 2005 doesn't count). This was going to be the trip of a lifetime--one which I'd promised Jean on our wedding day 33 years ago--and I vowed to soak in as much of the scenery and culture as I could. I hope these photos give you some idea of just how much soaking I did during the 15 days we were abroad.

Since this is a book blog, I'll mention my primary reading material: A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, first published in 1977 and re-released by New York Review Books in 2005. After doing a hasty, pre-trip Google search for books about the Danube, I discovered this literary gem which had been hiding in plain sight all along. A Time of Gifts is Fermor's travelogue-memoir about his walk from "the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube" in 1933. The eighteen-year-old Fermor left his native England to "set out across Europe like a tramp." Double-check that date and you'll see that his long-walk odyssey came at a particularly volatile time in European history. Some of the most dramatic scenes in the book involve local Germans and their intolerance of the brown-shirts of the Nazi Party who were then on the rise.

I used Fermor's narrative as a sort of antique guidebook in my own journey up the Danube. I should note, however, that Fermor's west-to-east course was the opposite of mine. Plus, he started his walk in the dead of winter. I, on the other hand, had to endure Easy-Bake-Oven temperatures in the high 70s (which sounded great to nearly everyone else aboard the Mimir except this Rocky Mountain Boy). I'll sprinkle some quotes from A Time of Gifts throughout the slide show below.

Bon Voyage!

Budapest at night

Viennese coffeehouse

We headed for a coffee house in the Karntnerstrasse called Fenstergucker. Settling at a corner table by the window near a hanging grove of newspapers on wooden rods, we ordered Eier Im Glass, then hot Brotchen and butter, and delicious coffee smothered in whipped cream.

Somewhere in the Wachau Valley

The footpath along the southern bank was leading me into the heart of the Wachau....Castles beyond counting had been looming along the river. They were perched on dizzier spurs here, more dramatic in decay and more mysteriously cobwebbed with fable.

Pug life in Regensburg

Nuremberg

Bamberg

Not high-heel-friendly

Sherwin-Williams should have a paint color called Bamberg Blue

Ivy league

Jean and I both agree Wurzburg was the best burg!

Marksburg Castle

Still Life with Fowl, Marksburg Castle

"Tis but a scratch...I've had worse."
My Monty Python moment

Koblenz

Koblenz

A point like a flat-iron jutted into the river and a plinth on its tip lifted a colossal bronze statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I many yards into the air among the sparrows and gulls.

Cologne

The Happy Sausage

Fake Wedding: model behavior outside Cologne Cathedral

After a first faraway glimpse, the two famous steeples grew taller and taller as the miles that separated us fell away. At last they commanded the cloudy plain as the spires of a cathedral should, vanishing when the outskirts of the city interposed themselves, and then, as I gazed at the crowding saints of the three Gothic doorways, sailing up into the evening again at close range. Beyond them indoors, although it was already too dark to see the colours of the glass, I knew I was inside the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe.

Cologne Cathedral

#NoFilter: Stained glass inside Cologne Cathedral

On our last day, we visited a cheese farm near Giessenburg, Holland

Blessed are the cheesemakers....

Don Quixote Fever: one of 19 windmills at Kinderdjik, Holland

There were the polders and the dykes and the long willow-bordered canals, the heath and arable and pasture dotted with stationary and expectant cattle, windmills and farms and answering belfries, bare rookeries with their wheeling specks just within earshot and a castle or two, half-concealed among a ruffle of woods.

Not to scale

My spirits, already high, steadily rose as I walked. I could scarcely believe that I was really there; alone, that is, on the move, advancing into Europe, surrounded by all this emptiness and change, with a thousand wonders waiting.

Kinderdjik, Holland: looking ahead at one of the thousand wonders of Europe

My Year of Reading: Every Book I Read in 2016

This Was the Year

This was the year I killed it, reading-wise: 130 books, a new record since I started keeping track of my habits in 2005 (the year I was deployed to Iraq with the U.S. Army, I had loads of free time on my hands, and I read what now looks like a paltry 50 books).

This was the year when I read fewer new books (i.e., those released in the past 12 months) than ones published in other years: 56 vs. 74. Part of that had to do with my commitment to making headway on my Five-Year Reading Plan of the Essentials (though I still have a long way to go on that list), but part of it also had to do with the fact that I occasionally let my fancy go free and footloose through my library, pinballing from one book to the next, no matter what the publication date.

This was the year I re-discovered audiobooks. Rather than listening to Bruno Mars, Electric Light Orchestra, or Sia on my daily commute to and from the Day Job, I opted for Audible.com and the aural pleasures of Timothy West rolling the prose of Anthony Trollope trippingly off his tongue through The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne and Can You Forgive Her?. Richard Armitage also brought David Copperfield back to life for me on my second time through the classic novel (which now might just be my favorite Dickens of all time, nudging Dombey and Son from the top of the list).

This was the year of Anthony Trollope. When I go all in, I go really deep.

This was the year I got a library card. After being appointed to the Butte-Silver Bow Public Library Board earlier this year, I realized—with a bucketload of chagrin—that I had rarely darkened the doorway of our beautiful 122-year-old library here in Butte, Montana (and never to check out a book—gasp!). I quickly corrected the error of my ways by taking out a book by Lee Child.

This was the year of Lee Child. For years, family friend Marilyn has politely badgered me to read the bestselling author. “I think you’ll really like him,” she says every time she sees me. I mean every frickin' time, without fail. Finally, caving in and attempting to silence Marilyn’s hectoring once and for all, I checked out a copy of A Wanted Man from the library. Within twenty pages, I was convinced Marilyn was the smartest person on the planet. Not only did I “really like” Child, I loved him. I immediately started binging on Jack Reacher. He turned out to be the Lay’s potato chip of action heroes. At our Christmas party a few weeks ago, I pulled Marilyn aside and told her of my new-found love for all things Lee Child. “Great!” she said. “Now, let’s talk about David Baldacci...”

This was the year I read a book about a horrific plane crash (Fireball) while I was flying cross-country from Montana to Georgia. I survived my flight; Carole Lombard, unfortunately, did not walk away from hers.

This was the year I should have revived The Biography Project here at the blog since I read books about The Lives of Others (author Anthony Trollope, baseball legend Ted Williams, film actress Carole Lombard, and author Sinclair Lewis—the latter which I haven’t completely finished, so I’m carrying it over to my 2017 book log).

This was the year of Sinclair Lewis. I originally read Main Street as part of my Five-Year Plan, but enjoyed it so much, I moved on to several other time-tested classics by the Midwestern satirist. I binged him hard. Like Lee Child hard, like Anthony Trollope levels of intensity. (Come to think of it, this was the Year of Binge.) I’m not through with Lewis yet. I plan to read at least two more of his before this year is out: It Can’t Happen Here (because, sadly, it did, it did) and Dodsworth.

This was the year I was surprised by how bad some books could be, given their popularity and the bestselling reputation of the author (the children’s classic The Black Stallion and Alan Furst’s A Hero of France to name just two), but I was also pleasantly surprised by how truly great some relatively-unheralded titles turned out to be (Searching for John Hughes; Not All Fires Burn the Same; Wilderness; and every book by Nickolas Butler, which I gobbled down in quick succession—by the way, The Hearts of Men, which comes out this March, is the best of them all). I was also left feeling flatlined by books I expected to love but only liked (The Sisters Brothers, Zero K, Then We Came to the End, I’m Thinking of Ending Things).

This was the year my wife, feeling like a “book widow,” sighed in exasperation, “You know, you’ll never be able to read ALL THE BOOKS.”

This was the year I turned to her and replied, “Maybe not, but I’m gonna try.”

Crunching the Numbers

Sure, I read a lot of poetry books which typically clock in at less than 100 pages. And, yes, I read quite a few stand-alone novellas (mostly from the fabulous Ploughshares Solo series) that were often less than 50 pages. But for every whisper-thin poetry chapbook or novella, there were books the size of small Pacific islands (I’m looking at you, Mr. Anthony Trollope Novel!). The proof in my book pudding comes when I crunch the numbers to determine the average page count (yes, I note the number of pages in my book log—don’t you?). In 2016, I read a total of 32,584 pages (not counting the 606 pages in the Sinclair Lewis biography, which I’m rolling over into the 2017 book log). That puts me at an average page count of 251, lower than last year’s average of 304 (note to my 2017 self: fewer novellas, more Trollope). But nearly 33,000 pages still feels like a whole helluva lot. I mean, I could never eat 33,000 Oreos in one year no matter how hard I tried.

More stuff which is possibly interesting only to me:

• The shortest book was Confession (24 pages) by Bill Roorbach, the longest was David Copperfield (877 pages) by Charles Dickens
• 44 of the 130 were e-books
• 5 were audiobooks
• 56 were published in 2016, 3 were advance copies destined to be released in 2017 or beyond, and the rest were from prior years
• 89 were written by men, 37 by women, 4 were a mix of both (anthologies or collaborations), and 0 were written by cats

And now, without further ado, I give you...

ALL THE BOOKS I READ THIS YEAR

Mrs. McGinty’s Dead by Agatha Christie
Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins
Escape and Reverse by Chelsey Johnson
Confession by Bill Roorbach
Over on the Dry Side by Louis L’Amour
The Revenant by Michael Punke
Wilderness by Lance Weller
Up From the Blue by Susan Henderson
The Detroit Frankfurt Discussion Group by Douglas Trevor
All I Want Is What You’ve Got by Glen Chamberlain
This is What I Want by Craig Lancaster
The House on the Cliff by Franklin W. Dixon
Selected Poems by Theodore Roethke
A Walk in the Sun by Harry Brown
Dog Run Moon by Callan Wink
The Darkening Trapeze by Larry Levis
Hollywood and the Holocaust by Henry Gonshak
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
The Other Felix by Keir Graff
Zero K by Don DeLillo
Galaxie Wagon by Darnell Arnoult
Tin House #66
Building Stories by Chris Ware
Look by Solmaz Sharif
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
A Wanted Man by Lee Child
By the Iowa Sea by Joe Blair
Make Me by Lee Child
Dead Man’s Float by Jim Harrison
Daredevils by Shawn Vestal
Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison
Men Be Either Or, But Never Enough by Andria Nacina Cole
Killing Floor by Lee Child
Cordoba Skies by Federico Falco
Unquiet Things by James Davis May
Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me by Andy Martin
The Black Stallion by Walter Farley
The Virginity of Famous Men by Christine Sneed
Little Known Facts by Christine Sneed
One Summer by Bill Bryson
Battle Rattle by Brandon Davis Jennings
Poems: New and Selected by Ron Rash
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
Into the Sun by Deni Ellis Bechard
Mississippi Noir edited by Tom Franklin
They Could Live With Themselves by Jodi Paloni
Still Come Home by Katey Schultz
56 Counties by Russell Rowland
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
The Soul in Paraphrase by Robert Boswell
Beach Plum Jam by Patricia Buddenhagen
The Art of Departure by Craig Lancaster
They Were Strong and Good by Robert Lawson
McWhinney’s Jaunt by Robert Lawson
Canoe Country by Florence Page Jaques
Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler
Sketchy Stories by Kerby Rosanes
The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses edited by Cecily Parks
Marrow Island by Alexis M. Smith
ShallCross by C. D. Wright
I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
Liar’s Code by Rich Chiappone
Beneath the Bonfire by Nickolas Butler
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
The Walking Dead #1 by Robert Kirkman
Classic Penguin: Cover to Cover by Paul Buckley
There Now by Eamon Grennan
Bestiary by Donika Kelly
Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
Exceptional Mountains by O. Alan Weltzien
Glimmer Train Stories #96 Spring/Summer 2016 (with a story by Yours Truly)
Melancholy Accidents by Peter Manseau
Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee
Closer All the Time by Jim Nichols
99 Poems by Dana Gioia
Searching for John Hughes by Jason Diamond
Nancy’s Mysterious Letter by Carolyn Keene
Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan
The Hour of Land by Terry Tempest Williams
The State We’re In by Ann Beattie
Splitting an Order by Ted Kooser
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Confusion of Languages by Siobhan Fallon
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
Footing Slow: A Walk with Keats by Eli Payne Mandel
Trending Into Maine by Kenneth Roberts
The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones
Koppargruva by Hugh Coyle
Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier
Landscape with Headless Mama by Jennifer Givhan
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King
The Iliad by Homer (Robert Fagels, translator)
A Hero of France by Alan Furst
Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen
Anthony Trollope by Victoria Glendinning
Not All Fires Burn the Same by Francine Witte
Night School by Lee Child
Dr. Wortle’s School by Anthony Trollope
The Door That Always Opens by Julie Funderburk
The Black Echo by Michael Connelly
Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams
Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope
The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico
The Mothers by Brit Bennett
The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri
Snowflake by Paul Gallico
Miracle in the Wilderness by Paul Gallico
Afterward by Edith Wharton
One Who Saw by A. M. Burrage
The Crown Derby Plate by Marjorie Bowen
The Diary of Mr. Poynter by M. R. James
The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by P. D. James
Waterlines by Alison Pelegrin
The Signalman by Charles Dickens
Christmas Days by Jeanette Winterson
Wintering by Peter Geye
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams by Ben Bradlee Jr.