The Grace, Abilene; Fort Phantom Hill, Abilene; Palace Theater, Childress.
Summer is my busiest season, and also my most hated season, with the heat, bugs and general swampiness that comes on around mid-June and stays until October. I’d like to hibernate indoors and skip the whole thing, but late spring through about November works best for travel planning, actual travel time, and making the books that my company publishes. Because other times of the year are busier with client projects and other priorities, during the summer, I am on the road every few weekends.
Coming up between now and the end of September: East Texas (four days, 13 towns — a lighter trip because I’ll be seeing family for a day or so); Port Isabel to Port Arthur (four days, 31 potential stops so far); Dallas to Santa Fe to Oklahoma City (TBD but probably 30-ish) and then back to East Texas, then hopefully an airplane trip somewhere later in the fall for a real vacation.
By the time all of this wraps up, I’m burnt out and saying never again. But at the end of the day, I really like what I do. It’s fun to see new things and interesting things in unexpected places. Last month in Athens, Texas, we saw a fiddle festival AND a robot barista. Found a new favorite “Mexican-Chamorro” coastal Mexican food restaurant alongside I-20. We’ve seen beautiful scenery, from canyons to mountains to bayous, within a few hours of our house in a very flat city. There’s a little Pennsylvania Dutch market and deli on the way from Dallas to Lufkin, and you won’t find a better kolache than theirs. Route 66’s Blue Whale of Catoosa, while not a hidden gem, is very fun.
Few things make me happier than when I hear that someone went somewhere cool that they learned about from me. When I was building my business, for a hot second I thought about adding a hosted tour component, but then remembered the words of an elderly boss at a church I once worked for: “Ya ignorant about politics, but ya know ya’self.” Harsh assessment? Backhanded compliment? Who can tell. But I know myself enough to know that I don’t have the temperament for all the interpersonal politics that hosted excursions would require. (*I did enjoy hosting art tours, but that’s a different scenario!)
I don’t want to be a travel influencer because, you’ll notice, none of my photos include selfies and influencing is all about selfies. I’m an older person who does not thrive outdoors. No one would be influenced by a sweating middle-aged lady on the sidewalk in Boll Weevil Tinytown, USA, fruitlessly typing “coffee shop Sunday hours” into her phone and wondering if the next public restroom will be as bad as the last one, or much worse.
So books it is, and other creative projects for clients and it’s working out pretty well. I spent a lot of years wondering what my life was going to look like and how things could possibly shape up after one thing went away or another thing never worked at all or all the myriad other ways that the future can seem to evaporate. I am fully aware that I will be wondering that again in my lifetime. But it’s nice to have a little less of that specific worry for now.
So, I pack my suitcase and the car cooler (again), say goodbye to the cats (again) and set off to see what lies just down the road.
This year, according to insights on my Kindle app, I read 27 books, compared to 29 in 2021 and just 13 in 2020. This includes purchased books and digital loans from the Dallas Public Library, and doesn’t include physical books or the small selection loaned to me for review through NetGalley. I mostly read library books because well, I love to read but my budget and bookshelves can only accommodate so many physical books.
There are a few weeks left in 2022, and quite a bit of downtime for me as business slows and I don’t travel for Christmas. So, I expect to add one or two more titles.
I gravitated heavily toward nonfiction this year. It was a very busy year, so I would have thought the opposite to be true — that I would want to escape into fiction. But my favorites mostly were in the true crime and history genre.
Something new that I have done for years, but only now started tracking, is recommending titles to my 88 year old Grandfather in East Texas. He reads anything and everything, regardless of genre, politics or author. He really likes books that give new insight to history and current events. I send him books to entertain him and try to keep him inside and out of trouble. But like me, he is a quick reader, so there is usually time between book deliveries for him to get into his garden to lift heavy things or mow with one of his ancient, pieced together “Frankentractors” or give unsolicited advice to construction crews across the street, much to the consternation of his grown children and other grandchildren. I have indicated the books I’ve sent to him and when applicable, his unfiltered feedback. (Well, slightly filtered — he shares his reads of the day with my mom at dinner, and she passes it on to me. But she includes strong opinions, cuss words and his…colorful turns of phrase.) If you, too have an elderly person to calm and entertain, maybe these recommendations will help.
These are just a few memorable books from 2022 out of many that I read, and in no particular order. I didn’t review as I went along, and won’t overburden the list with reviews here, just some hot takes. I’m becoming more active on Goodreads if you’d like to follow me there.
The 2022 Notable Book List:
Notes on an Execution, Danya Kukafka (Bookshop.org) Zabar’s: A Family Story, with Recipes, Lori Zabar (Bookshop.org) Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, Ada Calhoun (Bookshop.org) Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls, Kathleen Hale (Bookshop.org) *Hell’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier, Susan Jonusas (Bookshop.org) I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home, Jami Attenberg (Bookshop.org) *Big, Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas, Stephen Harrigan (Bookshop.org) *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Timothy Snyder (Bookshop.org) *The Accommodation: The Politics of Race in an American City, Jim Schutze (Bookshop.org) *Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family, Jess Walter (Bookshop.org) A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews (Bookshop.org) A Woman’s Story, Annie Ernaux translated by Tanya Leslie (Bookshop.org) Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong, Linda LeGarde Grover (Bookshop.org) Anna: The Biography, Amy Odell (Bookshop.org) I’ll Have What She’s Having: How Nora Ephron’s Three Iconic Films Saved the Romantic Comedy, Erin Carlson (Bookshop.org) *The Good War: An Oral History of World War II, Studs Terkel (Bookshop.org)
*An asterisk marks the books that I had sent to my grandfather.
The Hot Takes:
Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls, Kathleen Hale This is an intimate look at mental illness in youth, online culture, the ferociousness of young girls and the worst case scenario when the worst of those elements combine. Throw in a detailed look at the juvenile incarceration system and barriers to appropriate mental health care access for incarcerated youth, and you’ll look at “weird kids” with more compassion.
*Hell’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier, Susan Jonusas I really liked this one, and my grandfather loved it. He read it slowly so that the experience would last through the last hot weeks of summer. It had all the elements he liked, true crime, history and mystery partially set in Texas.
*Big, Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas, Stephen Harrigan I borrowed this one from the library and sent my grandfather a hard copy. If I wasn’t so sure I’d inherit it back in the next, oh, 50 years or so (if not longer, we can hope), I’d buy my own copy. He especially liked the archival photographs that went with the major points of the book.
*Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Timothy Snyder This was a grim read, but a good one. I’d think “uh-oh” when coming to an especially graphic bit, because I knew what my parents’ dinner table conversation would be once my grandfather got there himself. “I can’t believe people would do that,” he would say, before going into detail on just what they did and the results of their actions. But even grim stories are important and my grandfather agrees.
*Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family, Jess Walter I really liked this one, an unvarnished account of failures on the part of the government and the fringe beliefs and eccentricities of the Weaver family. “Damn crazy bunch, but the FBI was wrong to do what they did,” my grandfather said. (I’d like to note here that his favorite grandchild —not me!— is, in fact an FBI agent, but he calls things as he sees them.)
A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews This is set in a Mennonite community, but I found so much familiarity with my (secular) home community. I appreciated that Toews made the characters so multi-faceted. It is more common and I suppose, easier to write these insular communities as oppressed, simple or folksy but that does a great disservice to the very real lives they contain.
A Woman’s Story, Annie Ernaux translated by Tanya Leslie French writer Annie Ernaux and winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature was not a writer I was familiar with until her win was announced. While I regret that I have only just now begun to read her work, I’m also grateful that by now there is a lot of that work to read! Her stories are short and concise, and her literary voice is evocative and inspires emotion without being overly emotional. I have many more of her books on my library loan list, and can’t wait to read them.
Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong, Linda LeGarde Grover I read this and then interviewed Dr. Grover for the New Books Network, my last interview before our neighborhood went haywire with spur of the moment yard work noises and podcasting became impossible. This was a great book that incorporated Dr. Grover’s own story with her family history and folklore, and I am so glad I got to speak with her to learn more. (You can listen to the podcast here. I hope to podcast more in 2023, but that depends on the leaf blower brigade which is sadly, not up to me.)
*The Good War: An Oral History of World War II, Studs Terkel I love everything that Studs Terkel has ever produced, and this is no exception. Like my grandfather with his history books, I am pacing myself because sadly, there are no more Studs Terkel books forthcoming and I have read almost all of them. I purchased this for my grandfather’s Christmas present. He had a beloved uncle who died in WWII during Operation Husky, in Italy. In my family research I always look for new details to fill in the part of his story that happened so far away from home. This book does a great job of filling in color and the impact on individual lives from a variety of people who lived and served during the war.
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