If you’ve ever sat down on the couch and flipped the remote a few moments, found a non-offensive piece of television fluff, and spent the next two hours watching something pleasant but utterly forgettable, you know the exact feeling I had reading this book.

It was thoroughly non-offensive.

Two weeks from now I will forget anything about it, other than the author of A Year in Provence wrote it.  Oh, and they made a movie out of it.

The characters, plot, and setting make vanilla seem exotic.  I’d probably like the protagonist Max, along with the typical entourage, well enough.  It’s just that I know him about as well as I do the man down the street.  And thats with an omniscient narrator telling me Max’s interior monologue. 

I spent three or so hours reading this.  Not once did I hurl it across the room in a fit of disgust, but I am setting it down with the sad realization those are hours I can never regain.  It wasn’t even escapist enough for me to feel proud of procrastinating my lesson plans.

Harsh words from a woman who’s never published, I realize.  But for a man who’s written numerous books, he should have the concepts of TENSION and character development down pat.  The man should not need an amateur to tell him that books need to be grounded in little details, yet have something more at stake than wine swindle of minor proportions.  And while I enjoy the occasional slow but pensive tale, rich in mood and setting, if you’re going to hang your hat on ambiance and character, then develop them for God’s sake!

Blithe Tomato, by Mike Madison, reminds me that my new favorite writers are essayists.

Mike Madison is a writing farmer. 

His chapters, short and sweet, are funny observations about the people in his small town and those quirky characters he meets at the farmer’s market.  Customers and vendors alike are observed from a booth each weekend.  Little dramas unfold before his eyes, and they transfer well to paper.

Anne Lamott advises writers to create “short assignments”, and Madison follows this lesson beautifully.  Each chapter stands on its own.  Each chapter details one aspect of life, perfectly encapsulated.

This is, no offense, an ideal book for a busy person.  You can pick it up, set it down, and pick up where you left off days earlier.

My father-in-law is a retired seed farmer, and his life is filled with similar eccentrics.  I don’t know if I would have appreciated this unless I could see this book through his eyes.

On the shelf at the cottage we rented this weekend, I happened upon a book by my favorite poet, Mary Oliver.

I am not a poetry buff.  I try, but all I enjoy is Jack Prelutsky, Shel Silverstein, and the occasional Def Poet.  It shocks me even to be able to say with conviction that I HAVE a favorite poet.  The fourth grade poem I memorized was Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.  The report I did on Emily Dickinson, with all the romance of a solitary life, doesn’t make her poems excite me.

But Mary Oliver speaks to me, much in the way you long for poetry to connect.  Her poems are about nature on the surface, but underneath runs a current of passion and an acknowledgement of mortality. 

Someone once commented that a person who visits Yosemite will leave a theist.  One MUST believe in a greater meaning, a force and order to the universe, having seen the beauty of Half Dome and its surroundings.  Oliver’s poetry does the same for me...When my spirit’s weary and full of doubt, her poetry catches an angle of life so accurately that I have faith again.

west wind is a little heavy-handed with death, but in a way that forces the reader to be more aggressive about LIVING.  Artists used to do “memento mori” still lifes...with rotting fruit and sand clocks meant to admonish the viewer, “Life is short...”

This is not my favorite, but I left the book for another to read on a foggy morning in the cottage:

Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith

Every summer
I listen and look
under the sun’s brass and even
into the moonlight, but I can’t hear

anything, I can’t see anything—
not the pale roots digging down, nor the green
stalks muscling up,
nor the leaves
deepening their damp pleats,

nor the tassels making,
nor the shucks, nor the cobs.
And still,
every day,

the leafy fields
grow taller and thicker—
green gowns lofting up in the night,
showered with silk.

And so, every summer,
I fail as a witness, seeing nothing—
I am deaf too
to the tick of the leaves,

the tapping of downwardness from the banyan feet—
all of it
happening
beyond any seeable proof, or hearable hum.

And, therefore, let the immeasurable come.
Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.
Let the wind turn in the trees,
and the mystery hidden in the dirt

swing through the air.
How could I look at anything in this world
and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?
What should I fear?

One morning
in the leafy green ocean
the honeycomb of the corn’s beautiful body
is sure to be there.

This is not from west wind, but it speaks volumes about her work:

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

No one can hand a poem to another, promising this writer will change her life.  You may find Oliver’s words fall flat on your spirit, but for me, rediscovering Oliver on a quiet Saturday morning made that time in the cottage more memorable by far.

When you were little, you may have read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.  Perhaps you read the sequels.  But I think some of her best writing is about her life.  She wrote a series of books known as the Crosswicks Journals.  Right now, I’m re-reading the book about her life and marriage—to Broadway and soap star, Hugh Franklin—Two-Part Invention.

I don’t often re-read books.  I INTEND to re-read many, but when faced with a new story and one that is familiar, I am the playboy of the reading world.  I move on to new stories in a way that puts Colin Farrell’s (sp?) womanizing to shame.

Madeleine L’Engle is a woman I occasionally toss into my “Have Dinner with Anyone Living or Dead” List.  If you read Crosswicks, I think you’d agree she’s just the right blend of deep and witty.  She is one of those women that I think *gets it* about life.  Of course, maybe that is because she reminds me of a more glamorous version of my mother.