let the string of posts about summer fun begin!

After being a bit murky all winter about anything I was actually doing (besides school, and lots of reading during the holidays), I think it’s time to share the AWESOMENESS that is my life right now.

Summer is treating me well so far.  I’ve hiked the longest I’ve ever gone in my life (a 9-mi., 3500-ft. hike one day, followed by a 12-mi., 3000-ft. hike the next), I’ve biked the farthest I’ve ever been in my life (35 mi…. not all that impressive of a number, but still: 35 miles one day, transcontinental bike ride the next), and I feel like I could do anything this park throws at me.  (Apart from, you know, actual mountain climbing.  I’m still not that badass.) 

One damper on my spirits is I’d forgotten how furiously social everything in this park is.  The seasonals here roam around in packs, going into town to go dancing, going out drinking, going out hiking, and there are always fractured groups as volatile as in high school.  It’s like one big, grown-up summer camp, with horny 20-somethings all mashed together in cliques for one long, hot summer.  I’m glad to be back—I love deeply knowing the land and living in the mountains—but sometimes I dread being social at the end of the day.  After talking to people at the visitor center for 8 or 9 hours, the last thing I want to do is go home and talk more.  I find myself claiming to everybody that I’m a hermit—I’m antisocial—I hate going out—etc.  None of the above is true, but I value my time to be alone. 

That means that I’ve spent beaucoup de time this summer doing what I love: reading, writing, practicing the banjo, being alone in the woods, enjoying a good beer, cooking, having a good conversation over dinner, riding my bike longer and faster, hiking up to kick-ass places in the park, and doing a good job at work.  All that said, I’ve gotten to hang out with my favorite people plenty this summer, and I’m looking forward to the next few months as well.

Here’s a (rather poorly done) mosaic shot to keep you tantalized: this is the most gorgeous place in the park (but shh! it’s a secret… at least until I tell you more about it in a future post).

first books of the summer

It's summertime!  That means, among other things, that I get to read my little eyes out.  I have been going on many other adventuresome adventures, and soon pictures will be at hand, but for now, feast your eyes on these first seven books of the summer:

№1. Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · by John Daniel (6/11/2012)

I’m FREE!  I’ve finished my FIRST YEAR of grad school and I didn’t go mad with the stress of it all.  (At least, I hope I didn’t…*uncontrollable twitch*…)  After a whirlwind drive home, another long drive to a quick wedding where I said HI and BYE to a million people I haven’t seen for a million years, and suddenly finding lots of relatives were also getting home at the same time I was, all I’ve wanted to do is sleep, watch LOTR, practice the banjo, and sleep.  And read!  I haven’t read a book for fun since I got back from Singapore so many months ago, and I’m drooling over my TBR shelf.  Book #1 off said shelf: Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone by John Daniels.  The author came to Linfield several years ago and did a reading (as authors are wont to do) and I was suitably impressed—enough to go to Powell’s and buy a new copy of his book.  I read the first chapter or so and promptly forgot all about it.  Ever since then, I’ve carted the book all over the world (I think it went with me to Ecuador, Wyoming, Germany, Montana, Spain, and back to Oregon again) and it’s been staring at me balefully from the shelf.  I’d remembered the first couple chapters weren’t exciting enough to warrant a re-read, so I cracked it open to where I’d left my bookmark, and *YAWN*… I hadn’t thought it was that boring.  The premise of the book is that Daniels goes off to a cabin near the Rogue River for a winter to contemplate his life, his father, and nature (à la Thoreau), so he ends up just sitting in a cabin and talking about himself.  Which, I suppose is usually the point of a memoir—you talk about yourself, or, if you’re Frida, you paint yourself—but usually you have something Fascinating for the rest of us to Ooh over, instead of just talking about your rough relationship with your brooding father.  I’m assuming that John Daniels is a great writer and that I would have loved this memoir in a different time in my life, but right now, this book’s ponderousness is not my cup of tea.  All I’m up for is a beach read. ? out of 10.

®2. Name of the Rose · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · by Umberto Eco (6/16/2012)

This was another book that I started hace años, but I accidentally left it at a friend’s house for a couple of years.  Whoops!  As soon as I got it back, I re-read the first part and devoured the rest.  This book was published in 1980 in Italian and is seemingly experiencing a resurgence in English—I saw tablesfull of it at Costco—which is well-deserved, think I.  Name of the Rose is set in the 14^th Century in an Italian monastery, and there is a series of murders.  What ho!  Medieval Times! Italy! Murders! This must be good.  We follow the narrator (a bumbling novice monk) around the abbey, searching for clues and forming hypotheses.  The book was written by a professor of semiotics, and it shows.  The author spends pages making the narrator believable, as well as giving us readers the minute details of scholarly debates that were happening within the Catholic Church in Ye Olden Days.  All of this happens to be quite interesting, but, as I said in my review of the previous book, I’m more interested in the beach-read genre at the moment, so let’s ramp it up with the murder mystery!  Luckily, this book provides excitement in frequent supply.  Over the course of the story, seven monks die (I’m not giving anything away here, I swear; this is all on the back cover).  Grab hold of your habits, O Reader, and pick this book up along with your giganto packs of frozen coconut shrimp at Costco.  7 out of 10.

®3. Mañana, Mañana · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · by Peter Kerr (6/19/2012)

Having lived for a year (well, eight months, but who’s counting?) on Mallorca, I’m happy to read about my temporary home.  This book was written by a Scottish chap who, along with his wife and two teenage sons, bought a small finca (farm) on Mallorca with the intention of settling down.  He narrates charmingly the family’s first summer on Mallorca, although with the amount of anecdotes supplied in order to make this book readable, I’d imagine that a lot more summers’ adventures were condensed into this particular literary-worthy emblematic summer.  If you haven’t lived on Mallorca, then I’m not sure how you’ll react to this book (although reviewers apparently thought it was better than A Year in Provence, which similarly details an Englishman’s settling into southern France).  In Mañana, Mañana, I loved hearing about bits of the island that I’d learned to treasure.  Apart from the author’s rather terrible mallorquín, the book gave a loving and accurate portrayal of Mallorca about a decade ago.  6 out of 10.

®4. The Earth Speaks · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · by Steve Van Matre and Bill Weiler (6/30/2012)

O, Nature!  What are men compared to rocks and mountains?  What are mountains compared to the odes literary men have composed to them?  This beautiful book is bursting with quotes and poems encouraging us all to fall in love with our Mother Earth.  I have composed an entire ranger program around this book, and here’s one of the quotes that has so inspired me:

“This grand show is eternal.  It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.” —John Muir

®5. King Hereafter · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · by Dorothy Dunnett (7/12/2012)

I normally don’t write about re-reads here because, by the second time around, it’s too hard to capture the emotions of a first encounter with a book.  However, Dorothy Dunnett’s works are intricate enough to make each re-read surprising and enjoyable.  This is the second time I’ve read King Hereafter, a standalone book (as compared to her fabulous Lymond and Niccolò series), that combines all Dunnett’s gift for rich detail, plot twists, character development, and the re-creation of the historical worlds she has chosen.  In this particular book, our hero is Macbeth, fabled King of Scotland (whose story bears no resemblance to that of the sly and evil protagonist in The Scottish Play).  We travel to Scotland before it was known as Scotland, journeying through the Orkney Islands, Norway, Denmark, Germany, and Rome in the early years of the 1000s.  There are hints of a Norman future for England, but as of yet, the world of Northern Europe is full of Norsemen and Irishmen, of factions that have all but been erased throughout history, and of men who go a-viking in dragon-prowed longships.  As fascinated as I always am by Dunnett’s clever wordplay, I feel that her writing got too clever for me.  She wrote the Lymond Chronicles first, and they still stand as some of my all-time favorite books.  King Hereafter came next, followed by the Niccolò series, and Dunnett’s writing grew more and more opaque with each passing book.  King Hereafter paints a wonderfully rich picture of the turmoil in the northern part of the world at the turn of the last millennium, but it is a picture I feel I am looking in on from the outside, and I have to admire her glittering masterpiece from a distance.  For that, I have to knock a point off a Perfect 10, but this book truly is a magnum opus.  9 out of 10.

®6. The Passionate Fact: Storytelling in Natural History and Cultural Interpretation · · by Susan Strauss (7/15/2012)

At work, we have a wonderful library full of books to help inspire us to become better interpreters.  Several such books deal with storytelling, and since I’m trying to add a bigger element of storytelling in my ranger programs, I’ve started perusing these books.  The Passionate Fact has a rather unfortunate title (it hinges around the idea of basing a story off one fact that you care passionately about) but is a wonderful little book full of inspiration and insight.  7 out of 10.

®7. Here Be Dragons · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · by Sharon Penman (7/17/2012)

I have been on a historical-fiction kick lately.  After reading about Scotland in the 11^th Century (see King Hereafter, above), Wales in the 12^th Century seemed like a perfect sequel.  Plus, Sharon Penman is known for a series recreating the Napoleonic Wars … PLUS DRAGONS!  How awesome is that?  Who wouldn’t want to go fighting the French ON A FUCKING DRAGON?  However, Here Be Dragons is not said series, and has only symbolic dragons, and I was sorely disappointed.  Reading Sharon Penman after reading Dorothy Dunnett is like reading Christopher Paolini after J.R.R. Tolkein; it’s like trading an ocean for a sandbox.  The plot is ploddingly simple, but Penman tries to shake it up a bit by jumping from year to year, from narrator to narrator.  All of the narrators sound the same, however: naïve and petty, no matter if it’s the King of England or a 6-year-old.  Because each chapter takes place in a different year, we just have to assume each person gets older as the numbers turn, without seeing any evidence of character development in the writing.  And the writing!  Ye gods, the writing.  Hear me, O Aspiring Historical Fiction Author: Just because this is Ye Olden Times does not mean you should throw in “mahap”s and “wroth”s whenever you feel like it.  (They were speaking Middle English, Middle Welsh, and Old Norman, anyways, so your fancy words really are just stupidly extraneous.) Sentences such as the following will earn you a shunning: “I know not with whom my mother’ll be more wroth, me or my Uncle Gruffydd…” (p. 28).  Seriously, seriously, that sentence deserves a sharp kick in the nuts.  Here’s another passage that got my goat; in the following, one of the main characters is thinking of Eleanor of Aquitaine: “She knew she should only feel disapproval toward a wayward wife, a rebel Queen, but she was aware, instead, of a sharp, piercing regret, an ache for that wild spirit caged at last within Salisbury Tower” (p. 143).  Wild spirit, indeed.  And again, just because this is Ye Olden Times, you do not need to give narrators olden-ish Thoughts just to make sure we readers understand these characters Think Differently Because They Are Not Of This Millennium, and then suddenly undermine said Thoughts to make the narrator Relatable And Believable for us modern-day, easily gullible readers. 2 out of 10.