What New England-related Books Are You Reading?

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What New England-related Books Are You Reading?

1avaland
Okt. 21, 2017, 9:15 am

Thus far this year I've read:

The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans Divided by Michael P. Winship

This slim, well-written book was excellent at elucidating the times and the controversy which was much bigger than just Anne Hutchinson, who I thought was honestly profiled by the author.

New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America by Wendy Warren.
I've read a few books and one PhD thesis related to slaves, indentured servants, the triangle trade...etc. This is a very readable, eye-opening study of slavery in New England, focusing primarily on Africans, though she does touch on Native Americans also.

As far as fiction goes, I've got the new Jeffrey Lent in the TBR pile.

2Sandydog1
Jan. 25, 2019, 11:30 pm

Currently reading The Northern Forest. A bit dated, but good stories.

3imsodion
Bearbeitet: Apr. 7, 2019, 12:41 am

I recently read two books relating to my roots in New England. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. Two middle-aged men decide to walk the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. Bryson, an Englishman (an Alien being grown on an island country in Europe), was living in New Hampshire at the time and an old buddy from Des Moines joins him. Bryson had me openly laughing numerous times, more so in the first half of the book. Bryson gets progressively critical of American agencies that was wearing my nerves by about 3/4's through, but what can you expect from an Alien?
Jeeze, the other one was a charming story about an elusive dog, a recently divorced man who moves back to his native small town, becomes a policeman, grows into the quieter life, finds love and the dog falls in love with him. I don't remember the name; the author lives and writes - always with a dog character - on or near Martha's Vineyard.

4PatrickMurtha
Jul. 13, 2023, 7:23 pm

New here. Pocket bio: Retired humanities teacher, residing in Tlaxcala, Mexico, with two dogs and six indoor cats. Passionate about literature, history, philosophy, classical music and opera, jazz, cinema, and similar subjects. Nostalgic guy. Politically centrist. BA in American Studies from Yale; MAs in English and Education from Boston University. Born in northern New Jersey. Have lived and worked in San Francisco, Chicago, northern Nevada, northeast Wisconsin, South Korea.

I suppose this counts as a group revival, since the official listing here is “Dormant”. In any case, as I’m getting involved in LT Groups again, if the group I want exists and doesn’t seem beyond resuscitation, I’m going to go ahead and post in it. I’d rather do that, using an existing shell and membership, than start a new group.

Joseph C. Lincoln (1870-1944) was part of the explosion of “local color” writing at the tail end of the 19th Century, his turf being the otherwise unclaimed Cape Cod. I started in on his Cape Cod Stories (1907) this morning and was immediately struck by the affinity with Neil Munro’s contemporary Scottish stories about Para Handy, which started appearing in 1905. I doubt there was any direct influence, since I’m not sure if Munro’s very Scottish stories appeared in US editions then or ever. But the salty use of dialect, the nautical context, and the conception of the characters are quite similar. “Rollicking” is an appropriate adjective in both cases.

5PatrickMurtha
Jul. 16, 2023, 10:31 am

What Sarah Orne Jewett did for Maine in The Country of the Pointed Firs, Alice Brown (1857-1948) does for New Hampshire in her stories of “Tiverton” (Hampton Falls). Local color writers like this should appeal greatly to cottagecore enthusiasts of today! I am reading Brown’s Meadow-Grass: Tales of New England Life, and a noteworthy characteristic of the writing is her great precision regarding plant life, every species specified, which should make her work a delight for botanists and gardeners.

6PatrickMurtha
Bearbeitet: Jul. 20, 2023, 11:11 am

I’m currently reading The Diary of John Quincy Adams: 1794-1845, a selected (but long) edition edited by Allan Nevins in 1951. JQA is an interesting case because he appeared to dislike politics and public life, frequently stating his preference for being a reader, writer, and scholar; yet when he had a chance to do that, after his Presidency and in his early 60s, he launched right back into a nine-term career as a US Representative that took him to his death at age 80. It is theorized that he suffered from depression, and he consistently seems to have sought out whatever conditions would make him most miserable. The family mantle always weighed heavily on him * , and although one might find his sense of public service admirable, he was privately quite cynical about political life and constantly frustrated by it. It is not just that he couldn’t achieve what he wanted through politics - that is common - but he took no pleasure in the process, as the more extroverted can. Meeting with supplicants, for example, was profoundly tedious for him.

So the effect of the diaries which he assiduously kept is sad, but also stimulating because he was a man of genuine cultivation and always “in the thick of things”.

* Not just on him. His oldest son committed suicide at 28, and his second son drank himself to death by 31.

7avaland
Bearbeitet: Jul. 20, 2023, 11:14 am

Hi Patrick! Your posts are wonderful. Makes me want to get out some of those old classics. I've read quite a lot of them but it decades ago.

I can't say I've been reading much New England lit this year (such a large world full of books), although...

I read two nonfictions: Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser (2022). It does have a fair bit of New England content because of the mills. And then Tangible Things: Making History through Objects by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich et al. (2015)

a novel...This Other Eden by Paul Harding (fiction, US/Maine, 2023) I wish Harding will write more!!

Also read a poetry collection buy a Massachusetts poet Tender the River: Poems by Matt W. Miller /2021)

(Guess I read more than I thought I did) I'm a Mainer by birth, but have also lived in MA and now NH

8PatrickMurtha
Jul. 20, 2023, 11:13 am

^ Thank you so much for the kind words! All the books you mention sound really interesting.

9PatrickMurtha
Jul. 24, 2023, 10:27 am

I seem to be running into King Philip’s War a lot in my reading, so I thought I would undertake a classic history of the subject, Douglas Leach’s Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip's War. This is very well balanced between military, political, and social history, with plenty of conflict detail as best can be reconstructed.

10Marissa_Doyle
Jul. 24, 2023, 11:04 am

Joseph Lincoln's home is about a mile and a half from where I sit typing this, and my hometowns (both the one where I grew up and the one in which I've lived most of my adult life) were heavily involved in King Philip's War.

11PatrickMurtha
Jul. 24, 2023, 11:16 am

>10 Marissa_Doyle: That is great, to live in the midst of history and to KNOW about it. I grew up in northern New Jersey and had that sensation all the time because of excellent teachers and my history-loving mother.

12PatrickMurtha
Jul. 25, 2023, 1:30 pm

Just noticed that the crime / noir novelist Russell H. Greenan passed away on July 22 at the age of 97. He is something of a cult writer, especially for his first novel, It Happened in Boston? (1968). He published about a dozen novels altogether, including a couple that appeared initially in French translation. He has been on my to-read list forever, so I just ordered a copy of It Happened in Boston?

Almost all of Greenan’s novels are set in New England, primarily the Boston area.

13avaland
Jul. 26, 2023, 8:09 pm

>12 PatrickMurtha: Patrick, do you read mostly e-books?

14PatrickMurtha
Jul. 26, 2023, 9:16 pm

>13 avaland: I actually have an answer to this written already, because the subject has come up before, and this may be more than you want to know, but here goes. 🙂

These days my reading is about evenly split between ebooks and hard copies (I don’t do audiobooks). I much prefer physical books, but living here in Mexico, it can be convenient to have a book on my iPad in seconds after purchase, particularly if the price is right. My Scribd subscription gives me access to LOTS of ebooks I want to read for one monthly fee. And of course many difficult-to-find or pricey older books are available as ebooks through Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, the Open Library (although who knows what’s going on there), HathiTrust, etc. I use every service I know about.

All that said, I order about 12-20 used books per month from various sources and have them sent to my mail receiving service in Houston. My monthly fee there includes $60 of FedEx shipping (no rollover), which I apply once a month to having my purchases sent to Mexico. The mail receiving service re-boxes all of the books in one carton. It took me a while to work out this system, but now it works pretty smoothly.

So pick-up day at the FedEx office here in Tlaxcala is always a highlight of my month. There is a slight uncertainty factor involved, because online sellers invariably either OVER or UNDER-describe condition (some “Goods” are only “Acceptable”, some “Acceptables” are actually “Very Good”). But even if a book is in rough condition, and I sometimes order them that way deliberately to save money, I can have it nicely re-bound here for (drum roll) $6.00.

I used to be more picky about condition, ex-libs, and so on, but I have completely gotten over that. After all, it’s the text that counts. And many sorts of books that I am interested in can ONLY be found affordably as ex-libs.

15PatrickMurtha
Jul. 29, 2023, 11:43 am

This was a crime fiction morning at Chez Murtha. I read in the second of Jack O’Connell’s Quinsigamond Quintet, Wireless. These novels, set in a somewhat warped fictional version of Worcester, Massachusetts, are difficult to describe, but have a noir / borderline horror atmosphere and abound in eccentric characters. Although each volume is technically freestanding, I would start with the first, Box Nine.

As you can tell by looking by his reviews, O’Connell is a love him or hate him kind of author. He hasn’t published in a while, but I hear through the grapevine that he might get back to it, and I hope he does. I sent him word through a mutual acquaintance that he has still has plenty of fans out here.

Then I continued with some chapters in Simenon’s Pietr the Latvian, having decided to start the Maigrets at the beginning. (I had previously read one of the romans durs, Dirty Snow.) Great stuff, of course.

16PatrickMurtha
Bearbeitet: Jul. 30, 2023, 9:29 am

I love history books of the past because they were not written for us, nor with our preoccupations in mind; they had no way of knowing what our preoccupations would BE. They do provide a sense of the time when they were written, as well as the specific past they were written about. I don’t generally see them as “superseded”; they are informative. Whether the theory-ridden, hectoring books of today will hold up as well remains to be seen.

The 50-volume Chronicles of America series published by Yale University Press in 1918 makes for delightful reading, and are very handsome hand-sized volumes as well. I have read Charles M. Andrews’ Colonial Folkways: A Chronicle of American Life in the Reign of the Georges and Maud Wilder Goodwin’s Dutch and English on the Hudson: A Chronicle of Colonial New York, and am just about to start Emerson Hough’s The Passing of the Frontier; A Chronicle of the Old West.

17PatrickMurtha
Jul. 30, 2023, 10:03 am

I am reading the States and the Nation series of bicentennial histories; ex-library copies can be had very inexpensively. (I get this uneasy feeling that libraries don’t hold onto anything anymore, but are in a constant itch to deaccession.)

I read North Dakota first, because who knows anything about North Dakota? And it was fascinating. Now I am starting South Carolina, because my sister was until recently living in Charleston. And I have New Hampshire in my possession.

A nice feature of the series is the inclusion of a photographic essay about the state in each volume. The notes and bibliographies are excellent, and are hard on my wallet, because I have discovered MANY books that I want to have.

A benefit of reading these books is that I afterwards feel a deeper connection to that state, that I kind of “own” it, because how many residents of a state have read a full-length history of their home? One in a thousand? Probably not even that many.

So even though North Dakota is one of the few states that I haven’t visited, because it is not on the way to anything and requires a separate trip, I now feel very possessive of North Dakota. Did you know that Lawrence Welk’s distinctive accent was North Dakota Russo-German? He didn’t learn English until he was an adult.

18PatrickMurtha
Bearbeitet: Aug. 4, 2023, 9:53 am

Ben Benson (1913-1959) was a police procedural writer of the 1950s who died young but not before completing 19 volumes. (He had spent THREE YEARS in the hospital as the result of a World War II injury, and apparently began his writing as a therapeutic activity.)

I have read Beware the Pale Horse in Benson’s Wade Paris series (Massachusetts State Police Inspector), and enjoyed it very much. He also has another series about a Massachusetts State Trooper, Ralph Lindsey.

Crime fiction aficionados and bloggers have done excellent work on researching semi-forgotten writers such as Benson. I often obtain and read books like his because of a blog post that alerts me to or reminds me of a writer.

19dukedom_enough
Aug. 4, 2023, 10:12 am

>17 PatrickMurtha: Interesting about Lawrence Welk.

20PatrickMurtha
Aug. 4, 2023, 10:30 am

>19 dukedom_enough: I love learning things like that.

Although it is (and was then too) easy to scorn Welk’s style of music, he hired good musicians (Pete Fountain, Neil LeVang, Buddy Merrill, etc), some of whom viewed the gig as a cash cow for decades. It was far from a full-time commitment; all those musicians had a lot going on, and were much in demand for recording sessions among other things. Guitarist / fiddler Neil LeVang (fantastic player!) has spoken of how his relationship with Welk was cheeky, but they mutually recognized that they could benefit each other, and they did.

21avaland
Aug. 7, 2023, 6:34 am

Read Joyce Carol Oates fairly recent novella, Cardiff by the Sea set in downeast Maine (which means further up the coast). It was suitably creepy (and brought to mind high school band exchange concert I participated in the early 70s).