Book bingo update (spoiler: I'm sort of lagging)

 I can only note that I'm reading very slowly these days: here it is heading towards the end of June and I have only six squares filled in this year's book bingo card:

 Admittedly, I sort of realized early on that a lot of this year's squares were challenges that I didn't really care if I met; I just don't feel compelled to find a book about health or health care workers, for example. My approach has been to read what I feel like reading and then just see if it fits into a category. Happily, thus far everything has fit somewhere. Just now I was pleased to discover that Louise Erdrich has been an SAL speaker so it wasn't necessary to pretend that I believed Love Medicine counted for that troublesome health care worker square.

 Now I'm temporarily between books once more. If anyone wants to recommend something--preferably something I already possess--to fill any of these remaining squares, I'm all ears.

"The Housekeeper and the Professor"

From today's bike ride: parking strip of lupines

I don't usually worry too much about the links I use for my "books read" list (to the left of this post), but The Housekeeper and the Professor was such a lovely book--"highly original, infinitely charming, and ever so touching" as the Paul Auster quote (punctuation edited) on the cover puts it--that I spent some time trying to find a review that did the book justice. It's truly a book in which very little happens, but it's ever so fine in its simplicity. Plus, as it happens, I'm a sucker for math geekdom even if Scott had to help me with 

n (n-1) + n
    2

University Street Fair: Where Cats Play Accordian

You see the most amazing things at the University District Street Fair.

 

 

Seattle Independent Bookstore "Day" in too many words and pictures

 

Forty-one books and a handful of cards, bookmarks, and tshatshkes

I figure I should post about this year's edition of independent bookstore day, Puget Sound style, before I've forgotten it entirely--besides, I need to clear the little red table so we can use it for tea again. Above is the final haul; the couple of postcards were, if one is to believe the signage, hand-painted by one of the founders of Arundel Books and very nice they are too. Full disclosure compels me to admit that the birthday card in the back actually comes from the Bainbridge Island kitchen shop which has a really nice selection of stuff at reasonable prices. The bookstore on Bainbridge is also pretty decent--and surprisingly large. 

 

Speaking of Bainbridge, it's lucky the Seattle ferry dock has obvious signage and it's even luckier, for me, that I was traveling with Scott who asked, "Do you see the sign? The sign?" as I was distractedly cycling past it, looking for, well, a sign, as to where bikes were supposed to go. (Do note the blue skies above; the weather was a lot better than forecast for much of bookstore day. And, speaking of bookstore day, the event was stretched to ten days again this year. We hit bookstores on three separate days and still managed only ten. The Sunday we visited Bainbridge was a one-bookstore day. Late start, delayed ferries, and the surprise that Open Books isn't open at all on Sundays. Live and learn.)

 But let's back up a bit . . . We were oddly hesitant to explore the wilds of Burien where a new-to-us shop, Page 2 Books (pictured above), is located; I went so far as to email to ask about biking routes. I was told that there weren't any. There was an undertone of "you're crazy to even consider it" to the reply which may be why we had to make the attempt--and it wasn't all that bad. Oh, a bike lane on Ambaum Blvd wouldn't come amiss--and it would have been nice if the right lane wasn't repeatedly closed off for repair--but certainly we've ridden worse stretches of road, and downtown Burien turns out to be quite charming. The Australian Pie Company was like a trip to Brokenwood. Both Scott and I found a few books to buy at Page 2, though the mystery section was really the most impressive aspect of the store.

We took Fourth Ave SW back to White Center and Seattle and what an excellent thing that turned out to be. Scott thought it was more pleasant cycling while I'm not sure if less traffic but also narrower road is necessarily safer. We came across a Buddhist Temple under construction with a bunch of statuary waiting in the wings, however, and that was simply magical. Photos don't do it justice, but here are a few anyway:

The second (and final) store of the day was Paper Boat Booksellers and the selection there never disappoints--plus, they had madeleines which took me back to the first time I'd ever been to a bookstore. It was beneath some lime trees and my grandmother was there . . . 

Scott thought Bessie was precarious enough on her own so his bike isn't pictured here.

And that was the end of day one of Bookstore Day for us; two bookstores for 25 miles--but it was April 30 so the distance didn't count for Bike Everywhere Month. Rats.

The next day, as above, we were slow to get moving and visited only Bainbridge which got us 12 miles (this time in Bike Everywhere Month--whee!). Blackbird Bakery is essentially across the street from Eagle Harbor, meaning less than half a mile from the ferry terminal, and had some mighty fine-looking cake. I was devastated when they closed before we could get back there. Next time. 

Bikes outside Eagle Harbor

It wasn't until the following Saturday that we set out again, this time in a somewhat more serious frame of mind though, again, we got a late start. Open Books didn't open until noon so we had some excuse. The first stop was Arundel, where I was once more struck by what a nice selection of new and used they have, though I bought but one book and the two hand-painted postcards. Scott did his bit to keep them in business too, though he opted to leave behind the set of Ruskin. Which decision I am sure he will regret. 

Again, note the shadows and sunshine!

Open Books took a tiny bit of routefinding, mostly because I had it in my head it was now occupying the old Seattle Mystery Bookshop (sadly closed now), but it was really across the street and down from there. The new location has a lot more room which is nice. I spotted a book I wanted in their window and then found a few more items while browsing and Scott never has trouble finding stuff there, so we were fairly quick. This was the one stop where a number of people were just dashing in to get a stamp and leave again which always strikes me as rude and tacky.

It's like we're doing a bank heist, the way these bikes are parked here.

Where the hell did we go from here, I ask myself, and then realize it was up to Capital Hill by way of Sugar Bakery, photos of which are on Scott's phone--as are the photos outside Elliott Bay Book Company. I confess I didn't get beyond the staff recommendations shelf at Elliott Bay; that store has made me a little twitchy since the onset of COVID. Let me just interject here that This Is How You Lose the Time War was, perhaps, the most recommended book of this year's tour. I read it last year and it was  a fun read, but I was still a little surprised to see it quite so often. It was, I think, starting to rain a bit by the time we hit Elliott Bay and we had a brief, "Continue or call it?" conversation. Naturally, we continued; after all, Ada's Technical Books and Cafe, was just up the hill. 

 

The road I chose was, possibly, the most broken-up to be found in Seattle and it was a bumpy half dozen blocks; it's never good when you can see the evolution of paving technology while riding. Ada's is one of those odd shops for which I have a very soft spot despite its pretty limited selection. I think it's that I love the concept and the staff is very personable. To those two reasons I now add a third: the excellent gyros. Maybe we were just starving, but this was the best falafel I've had in years.

Lunch at Ada's -- gyros plus a decent cup of tea with covered outdoor seating  = bliss

 

Plus a floor show!

Ada's is just a few doors down from what must be the last surviving balloon store in Seattle and this man had overestimted the capacity of his hatchback. A few popped while he was trying to get them all in but I'm sure someone was still thrilled with the extravaganza. 

There was another "continue or call it" discussion and another decision to continue northward which we did, reaching University Bookstore in short order. (Interjection #2: I do love that the University of Washington Bookstore was such an early adopter of the internet that its web address is just "ubookstore.com.") Once more, books were purchased and the obligatory photo taken, this time from the middle of the street; traffic is pretty slow on the Ave these days.

We pushed further northward to Third Place Ravenna, another shop I visit only on bookstore day though each year I wonder why I don't go there more often; they have such a fine selection and it's a pretty nice ride. They're also ever so convenient to Sod House Bakery and Seattle Bagel Oasis (neither of which, oddly, we visited, perhaps because Scott had but one pannier on this outing).

An upstart bicycle was already at the rack at Third Place--the nerve!

 From Third Place it is truly a pleasant and mostly flat ride to Phinney Ridge Books--there's just a few blocks of uphill to get to the "ridge"--and it's mostly bicycle lane around Greenlake so it's a lovely bit of riding, I must say. Phinney Ridge is a pretty small shop but, like Paper Boat, it must have excellent buyers because it's always got a ton of good books. And it was nice to see Molly Hashimoto's Mount Rainier National Park: An Artist's Tour by the register:

And the obligatory bikes outside shot (hard to see in this shot is Northwest Trees in the window):

The ride down from Phinney to Secret Garden was interrupted briefly by a stop to pose Bessie among a mass of fallen cherry petals, but even without that delay we would have found Secret Garden closed. I'm not telling bookstores how to run their business, but I do think they might want to think about being open later than 5:00 p.m. on a bookstore day Saturday. Still, I'm sure they're doing well enough without our custom and we would have missed the cherry petals if we hadn't been heading down into Ballard.

I was, in fact, getting a bit dopey by the time we reached Ballard and, frankly, it's a bit of a surprise I managed the homeward ride. We cut it a few miles short by catching a bus on Harbor Island, but the outing was still good for 28 miles, for a total of 65 independent bookstore "day" miles this year. This year the organizers behind Seattle Independent Bookstore Day determined that the goal should be to get to all twenty-four participating stores, ranging from Edmonds to Burien, from Bremerton to Kirkland, and that's just too much for even my competitive nature. We like doing bookstore day by bike and we like browsing and buying at each store we manage to visit. I regret that we didn't get to Magnolia's Bookstore this time around, but that's my only regret. Okay, not getting a slice of the lavender raspberry cake at Blackbird still eats at me too.

Honey bees make honey; mason bees make food

Supply of special mud for the mason bees

"It's been a very bad year, and next year will probably be worse," is the way I remember a line from The Wind and the Lion; I don't know how accurate my memory of the quote might be, but it seems a fair assessment of the state of the world currently. So it seems both particularly self-absorbed and particularly essential to pay attention to things that aren't awful and that, really, means things that happen on our wee bit of property. Last week I finally received my desperately awaited package from the Rent Mason Bee people and we wasted no time in setting out the bee house and opening up the capsule containing the mason bee cocoons. Two or three bees emerged immediately which was gratifying since most of the plum's blossoms had already blown away.

Block for future mason bees plus tube of cocoons

A few of the few remaining plum blossoms

 

Whether those bees had any interest in the plum, I can't say. If they had any sense at all they quickly returned to the container from which they'd emerged since the weather soon returned to scarcely above freezing. It's not an easy year, even within Aurora's penumbra. But we've established a hole with some very sticky clay-mud for the masons to use should they deign to reproduce here and we are hoping for the best. It's a very pretty time of year in Seattle, even if it's as cold as November and life feels fraught.

The quite lovey backyard mid-April

 

 *Once more, I haven't a clue what is going on with the formatting on this post. So it goes.

Travels with murderous wild animals and high-falutin' poodles

 

Gratuitous snap of Bessie on a weekend adventure to give this post visual interest

I finished Travels with Charley this weekend and thought about posting a brief excerpt; Steinbeck's paragraphs about Seattle, based on his 1960 visit, could have been a recent Danny Westneat column what with his talk of the way charming old neighborhoods have been displaced by modern hive-buildings and the rampant crime making downtown feel unsafe for even police. But that would require a lot of tedious keying-in and I'm tired these days. 

 Travels with Charley was followed by Juneau Black's Shady Hollow which is the very paradigm of the quick read; it's a cozy mystery oddly reminiscent of the early Gamache books (small village where everyone hangs out at the coffee shop and bookstore), but it's all animals: the plucky fox newspaper journalist, the gruff bear cop, the tycoon beaver . . . 

This post is brought to you by the conclusion of the Chasing the Four Winds review I chose for my books read column because it sums it up so nicely:

Final Conclusion: If you’re looking for a quick read that isn’t going to shake up your world views or offer any glaring insights into the human condition, then this is the book for you. Fun and refreshing, I can see myself continuing this series well into the future.

 I don't necessarily see myself reading more books in the series, but I don't entirely rule it out. 

Oh, but look. Someone else has gone to the effort of infringing on copyright and scanning the text of Steinbeck's book to post online. Here's the Seattle bit, somewhat tidied up. (I don't swear all the paragraph breaks are correct):

It was only as I approached Seattle that the unbelievable change became apparent.

Of course, I had been reading about the population explosion on the West Coast, but for the West Coast most people substitute California. People swarming in, cities doubling and trebling in numbers of inhabitants, while the fiscal guardians groan over the increasing weight of improvements and the need to care for a large new spate of indigents. It was here in Washington that I saw it first. I remembered Seattle as a town sitting on hills beside a matchless harborage-a little city of space and trees and gardens, its houses matched to such a background. It is no longer so. The tops of hills are shaved off to make level warrens for the rabbits of the present. The highways eight lanes wide cut like glaciers through the uneasy land.

This Seattle had no relation to the one I remembered. The traffic rushed with murderous intensity. On the outskirts of this place I once knew well I could not find my way. Along what had been country lanes rich with berries, high wire fences and mile-long factories stretched, and the yellow smoke of progress hung over all, fighting the sea winds' efforts to drive them off.

This sounds as though I bemoan an older time, which is the preoccupation of the old, or cultivate in opposition to change, which is the currency of the rich and stupid. It is not so. This Seattle was not something changed that I once knew. It was a new thing. Set down there not knowing it was Seattle, I could not have told where I was. Everywhere frantic growth, a carcinomatous growth. Bulldozers rolled up the green forests and heaped the resulting trash for burning. The torn white lumber from concrete forms was piled beside gray walls.

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction. Next day I walked in the old port of Seattle, where the fish and crabs and shrimps lay beautifully on white beds of shaved ice and where the washed and shining vegetables were arranged in pictures. I drank clam juice and ate the sharp crab cocktails at stands along the waterfront. It was not much changed—a little more run-down and dingy than it was twenty years ago. And here a generality concerning the growth of American cities, seemingly true of all of them I know. When a city begins to grow and spread outward, from the edges, the center which was once its glory is in a sense abandoned to time. Then the buildings grow dark and a kind of decay sets in; poorer people move in as the rents fall, and small fringe businesses take the place of once flowering establishments. The district is still too good to tear down and too outmoded to be desirable. Besides, all the energy has flowed out to the new developments, to the semi-rural supermarkets, the outdoor movies, new houses with wide lawns and stucco schools where children are confirmed in their illiteracy.

The old port with narrow streets and cobbled surfaces, smoke-grimed, goes into a period of desolation inhabited at night by the vague ruins of men, the lotus eaters who struggle daily toward unconsciousness by way of raw alcohol. Nearly every city I know has such a dying mother of violence and despair where at night the brightness of the street lamps is sucked away and policemen walk in pairs. And then one day perhaps the city returns and rips out the sore and builds a monument to its past.

Bike-by mileage update

 

Just to prove I'm still here I post my cycling update, three months into the year. Surprisingly, it gets more challenging to ride as the weather improves and the yard and garden demand more attention. I bravely persevere, inspiration that I am.