“Gridley Girls”

Meredith Carlin First was born and raised in Gridley. Though she lives with her family in Minneapolis and Sacramento, small town life was a formative influence, so much so that she left as a recruiter with Apple Inc. to write a (fictionalized) account of her growing up.

“Gridley Girls” ($17 in paperback from SparkPress; also for Amazon Kindle) is the story of Margaret (Meg) MacGregor Monahan in her freshman year at Gridley High in 1978. “My father’s father is Mormon … and my mother’s family went to the First Christian Church. You could say I’m half Mormon and half anti-Mormon. Sets things up for a very harmonious childhood.”

She has three older sisters. Her mom’s admonition: “Remember girls, Y-A-L. You’re a lady.”

Meg and the other Gridley Girls never give up on each other. In 2008, Meg is living in Sacramento and is helping her best friend Anne prepare for her wedding. Anne is nervous, and Meg can’t seem to forgive herself for betraying Anne long ago. “It wasn’t over a boy or a catty, teenage-girl prank. It was because of God. I broke the solemn trust of a lifelong friend because I was a misguided girl who was told a secret that I was incapable of hearing, let alone keeping.”

The two friends revisit their shared past in a tale that is at times outrageously funny and soberly honest. Think Erma Bombeck meets Judy Blume. “Let’s recap the second half of 1978, shall we? I graduated from eighth grade as a naïve, innocent girl alongside my best friends. … Then I started high school, got a boyfriend, got felt up, panicked, broke up with said boyfriend, became a peer counselor”—and heard the confessions of two friends that left her confused and vulnerable.

Readers will revel in the sounds and sensibilities of the seventies in this witty, poignant, and captivating novel.

The author is scheduled to be interviewed by Nancy Wiegman of Nancy’s Bookshelf on North State Public Radio, mynspr.org, on Friday, July 8 at 10:00 a.m.

Meredith First will be signing copies of her book on Saturday, July 16 from 11:00 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. at Macs Hardware, 550 E. Gridley Road in Gridley.

“An Empty Swing”

Chico writer N. J. Hanson probes the destructive power of revenge in a novel of paranormal horror, “An Empty Swing” ($18.99 in paperback from Tate publishing; also for Amazon Kindle).

Luis Chavez, a fifteen-year-old sophomore at West Point High School in an unnamed town, is drawn into a battle for his life when he meets a girl named Alice at the old playground in town. It is almost Halloween.

It turns out that Alice is dead, a ghost, a spirit hanging around the playground where almost a dozen children lie buried, the victims of a murderous child rapist still on the loose. She cannot pass into the “other world” until she is certain that her living sister, Cindy, is safe.

Cindy has taken the name Serena Ravenwood. “She was a junior, one year older than Luis, and the resident Goth chick. … She wore a long heavy coat and cargo pants with combat boots. The only bit of color at all was her bright red lipstick.” Luis is in the school library trying to figure out why he can see Alice when he meets Serena in the same section, and soon they realize who Alice is. Or—was.

Alice had been kidnaped, abused, and killed years before. Now, after Luis realizes he is a kind of “spiritual medium” who can see ghosts, he is drawn to the playground (and to Serena). Though the bully Butch is often the antagonist (he can see spirits, too), he’s not very smart.

Far more dangerous is Paul, the ghost of one of the children abducted, killed, and buried. Paul discovers he can move beyond the playground, can manipulate objects (like rocks and guns), and, feeling his power, murders his parents and brother (the fingers in the blender scene is especially sickening) and sets his sights on Luis (for taking away Alice’s attention). He even makes common cause with the molester.

It looks like Luis doesn’t have the ghost of a chance of escaping. But don’t count out the power of friendship. And love.

The author will be signing copies of his book Saturday, July 2 at ABC Books, 950 Mangrove Avenue in Chico, from 11:00 am – 3:00 p.m.

“Contracting For Services In State And Local Government Agencies”

Imagine a state agency wants to hire a private company to clean up a Lake Oroville beach area. How should that agency determine which company will provide the best deal for taxpayers? Cost is key, but “cheap” is not a synonym for “a job well done.”

Finding the best company to perform a service on the public’s dime is the focus of “Contracting For Services In State And Local Government Agencies” ($94.95 in hardcover from Routledge; also for Amazon Kindle) by William Sims Curry. The second edition of the book has just been published, and it updates “best practices” based on a 2015 survey of states, cities and other governmental entities.

Bill Curry is President of WSC Consulting in Chico; he is a Certified Professional Contracts Manager and served on the Professional Standards and Ethics Committee of the National Contract Management Association. His book provides not just guidance for agencies but online templates ranging from a “request for proposal” (RFP) to a Contractor Performance Report.

Chapters provide exquisite detail on healthy competition (Curry writes me that “reliance on sole source contracting during emergencies can actually delay the delivery of services and supplies”); setting up transparent communication; dealing with conflicts of interest; responding to protests; contract review; and how to rank proposals in the first place.

Curry shows how various contract proposal scoring mechanisms (from color coding to a 1-10 scale) fall woefully short. For example, if a group of contract reviewers using a 10-point scale tends to favor a range of 7-10 (7 would be “average” or acceptable), another reviewer could bias the result by using the full range, assigning a 1 here or a 10 there.

A better way is called Total Weighted Score, which involves using a 7-10 scale for subjective ratings and a weighted score for objectively determined items (like cost). The idea is for the RFP to say how much the cost or number of employees “counts” in the final determination. (I note that the Federal Department of Defense, which prohibits such scoring, should get a clue.)

Curry’s comprehensive guide is great beach reading--especially if your company is proposing to clean it up.

“From Ashes Into Light: A Novel”

Erika Lunder of Chico created Raincloud Press (raincloudpress.com) in order to publish the poetry of her mother, Gudrun Mouw. Since then she has taken on additional authors and has just released Mouw’s first novel, “From Ashes Into Light” ($27.50 in hardcover; also for Amazon Kindle). Mouw, born in Germany and now living in the Santa Barbara area, has taught English, yoga and meditation.

The story begins with twelve-year-old Ruth, in Salzburg, Austria on November 10, 1938. It is Kristallnacht, “night of shattered glass, broken bodies and broken faith.” But, as this novel of deep conviction asserts, this is not the final word.

Dachau ends Ruth’s physical life. “The row behind us drops with fumbling, crumbling sounds, as if there’s hardly any mass to the bodies. I hear other noises between gunshots, a moan, a quick cry ended with a shot, the cracking of bones. Bullets whirl fast and close. Something hits my back hard. So many shots fly at us, we bloom like red roses, our limbs falling to the ground. We spray in every direction. . . .”

But, as silence descends, “out of the dark comes a light of awareness. I am free. I am floating. I don’t need the body. The light grows and grows. Light pervades every fiber of my spirit. … Perhaps, time doesn’t pass. Perhaps, everything happens all at once. I might be dreaming, or I might be awake, gazing like a stranger at the globe that was once my home. Below, bodies are burning. Wings have risen from the ashes.”

Mouw’s story blends the spirit of the phoenix, reincarnation, Native American spirituality and Hasidic mysticism to unite, in a timeless realm, Ruth, Saqapaya (part of the First People at the time of Spanish conquest in California), and Friede Mai (German-born during World War II who faces suspicion in the US, but overcomes it).

In the end, hate is vanquished: Phoenix says of Friede, “I feel she is ready to take on the work of Saqapaya’s vision, my vision, Ruth’s vision, the vision of those who embrace a path of light and love.”

Nancy Wiegman’s author interview for Nancy’s Bookshelf, on mysnpr.org, is at bit.ly/1TZPYvz.

“Vista Del Mar: A Memoir Of The Ordinary”

Magalia resident Neal Snidow, who teaches English at Butte College, grew up in the Redondo Beach area of Southern California. He was an only child, and “well acquainted,” he writes, “with tropes of loneliness—the compulsive blank gaze at walls, window boxes, sea light, and the desert pleasure of empty sights and sounds.”

In 1996, in throes of mutual grief after his wife’s miscarriage, he took a tripod-mounted camera and black-and-white film and began photographing his old hometown, the commonplace “surfaces that, like the suburbs themselves, seemed ‘blank’ at first glance but on which could be seen a subtle patina of history as well, a trace of lost time within which some sort of answer to the present might wait.”

Thus begins an exploration of his family’s history and in mesmerizing words, by turns sublime, funny, and wise, mingled with dozens of images, the story is told in “Vista Del Mar: A Memoir Of The Ordinary” ($18.95 in paperback from Counterpoint; also for Amazon Kindle; for more visit vistadelmarbook.com).

Time in the book is never tame, swirling and jumping as Snidow pieces together a life of meaning. Family stories “gave me associations that lit the intertwining of memory and space until something called ‘history’ seemed to occur.”

“Somewhere in my mid-thirties,” Snidow writes, “in the 1980s, I began to get lost. … I drank too much, didn’t sleep well, and started to have blood pressure spikes….” But time “now looped on, doubled back, left the impression of its meander. ... For a period it was the fall of 1996 and we were beginning the adoption process. …”

The end of the book loops back to the start, only this time it is heady with an extraordinary coincidence surrounding the birth mother and a man who one lonely day decided to take black-and-white pictures of home.

A launch party and book signing will be held Thursday from 7:00-9:00 p.m. at 1078 Gallery, 820 Broadway in Chico. The event is free. In Southern California he will be interviewed on the art of memoir by his editor, Jack Shoemaker, at Café Society in Point Richmond on Friday, June 24 from 7:00-9:00 p.m.

“Stoner”

With the sounds of college and university graduation in the air, it seems fitting to notice a new edition of an extraordinary novel of academic life first published in 1965. Author John Williams tells the story of a nondescript assistant professor of English in the first decades of the twentieth century at a fictionalized University of Missouri.

“Stoner” ($14.95 in paperback from New York Review Books Classics; also for Amazon Kindle with a superb audio narration by Robin Field) presents the life of one William Stoner who taught at the university from 1918 until his death in 1956.

“Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now.” Yet, through the course of the novel, Williams draws out Stoner’s inner life and surrounds him with vivid personalities, like his mercurial wife Edith, their pensive daughter Grace, and Hollis Lomax, his arch nemesis in the English department. Then there is Katherine Driscoll, a younger teacher who becomes his lover.

In many ways Stoner lives a pedestrian existence, sometimes passive in his home life and university politics, sometimes passionate in the classroom when the subject turns to Medieval and Renaissance literature.

“He had come to that moment in his age,” Williams writes, after a showdown with Lomax that does not go well, “when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. … He took a grim and ironic pleasure … that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.”

And yet this is a story about love. “In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”

Stoner’s life a failure? Well, yes and no, the novel answers. What did you expect?

“Hearing From The Father: Finding True Hope And Joy In A Broken World”

What should we know about an author? Native Chicoan Mike Mercer put it this way in an email: “Mike graduated from Rosedale, Chico Junior, Chico High, and finally went down in educational flames at eighteen - a victim of his own fly fishing passion - fleeing his Butte College schooling for a dream job at The Fly Shop in Redding,” his home. Then he adds: “Raised in a family that pursued God, Mike spent his first 40 years with no use of a Savior...until he did...”

“God reached down,” he writes, “and saved me from myself.” Later, he found himself in intimate conversation with God, who prompted him, directed him, admonished him in writing stories about living the authentic Christian life.

It's like knowing the person next to you is in agony and needs prayer, Mercer says. “Have you felt that immediate and incredibly urgent prodding to pray with them … not over lunch, not later that day, but right now? That is perhaps the best way I can describe how He shares these with me, as (often) urgent prayers; as reflections of His heart that He very much wants me to grasp….”

The pieces are collected in “Hearing From The Father: Finding True Hope And Joy In A Broken World” ($15.99 in paperback from Xulon Press; also for Amazon Kindle).

The chapters are thoughtfully and beautifully written; some blend fictional and real life experiences; others are reflections on the difficulty of living in a world in which devilish evil is very real.

In “Accept His Love For You,” an abused woman named Hope says, “We go through a scary time in our life and we are afraid; we worry, what if He doesn’t show up? Listen to me—if you are really living your life for Him, He doesn’t have to ‘show up’ … He never left!”

The final story is about a 40-year-old man who loses his job but gains a different kind of employment, a new purpose. Years later, “his life is defined by gratitude, and joy, and never once does he regret this choice, made all those long years ago.”

“The Long Goodbye: Khe Sanh Revisited”

In a book published more than a decade ago, “A Patch Of Ground: Khe Sanh Remembered,” Michael Archer told the harrowing story of his part in “the most protracted, costly and consequential” battle of the U.S. war in Vietnam.

It is also the story of his best friend, Tom Mahoney. They both enlisted in the Marines in 1967, and on July 6, 1968, under strange circumstances, Mahoney was killed by the enemy after he apparently walked outside the perimeter of an outpost established on a hill near Khe Sanh. The area was being evacuated and his body was not recovered.

“The place had been wrested fifteen months earlier from an entrenched North Vietnamese battalion in a bloody four-day battle that resulted in scores of dead and wounded, and was held at great additional cost of life as the linchpin to Khe Sanh’s survival. As the rhythmic popping of the helicopter blades receded into that July night, the agony of Hill 881 South finally came to an end.”

But Archer’s own agony did not end. He had to know if Tom’s final resting place could be located and perhaps his remains repatriated. His book helped him make connections, both here and in Vietnam, and the quest was on. The story is told in “The Long Goodbye: Khe Sanh Revisited” ($21.95 in paperback from Hellgate Press; also for Amazon Kindle).

Archer (michaelarcher.net) lives in Reno; his brother, Brian, is a Chico State University grad and managed Madison Bear Garden for a time; and one of the central persons in the new book is Chico native Steve Busby, who signed up for the Marines in 1967 only to witness Tom’s death the next year.

Part battlefield account and part detective story, the book chronicles frustrations with official government efforts, connections with Mahoney’s family, work with a Vietnamese psychic who claimed to be in touch with Mahoney’s “wandering soul,” and meetings with former enemies who wanted to honor Archer’s friend. The riveting story is brilliantly told.

Tom’s fate is prised out of the fog of war and there comes for Archer “something that had been missing for the last forty years,” a measure of peace.

“Before We Visit The Goddess”

“Spent two beautiful days in Chico,” writes American Book Award winner Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni on her Facebook page, “speaking/teaching at the WordSpring Writers conference at Butte College. … Drove through Yuba City, one of the oldest Indian American settlements in America. … Ate the most amazing locally grown strawberries!”

The WordSpring creative writing conference, held a week ago, coincided with the publication date of Divakaruni’s new book, “Before We Visit The Goddess” ($25 in hardcover from Simon and Schuster; also for Amazon Kindle). Born in Kolkata, India, she received a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and now lives with her family in Houston, Texas. (There’s more at chitradivakaruni.com.)

Her new book is a series of intertwined stories of three generations of mothers and daughters. Sabitri makes something of herself in Kolkata, opening Durga Sweets, a shop named after her mother who had told her “go through life with your head held high.”

But family life is complicated, to say the least, and Sabitri’s daughter, Bela, turns her back on her mother and joins her boyfriend, who must escape India because of his politics, to marry him in the United States. Bela’s daughter, Tara, stung when her parents divorce, descends into drink and drugs.

The story begins in 1995 with Sabitri, now sixty-seven, writing to Tara, urging her to finish college. It ends, after many twists and turns in the chronology, in 2020, with Tara, about to take her mother to Sunny Hills and who, in cleaning her house, finds the photo albums. “The books are jumbled and in no chronological order.” The novel sorts its stories not by date but by theme.

“Do you want to know why I steal?” Tara asks her mother. “I take things that I should have had but didn’t get. … I steal them because there’s a big hole in the middle of my chest and stealing fills it up for a moment.” There are “big holes” everywhere in the lives of the three women, but family tragedy is tempered by the kindness of strangers and the true meaning of being a “fortunate lamp,” achieving something on one’s own.

Readers will savor the words, sweet and tart comingled.

“My Grandma Angel”

Lisa DeLaby is Director of the Office of Institutional Advancement and Butte College Foundation, but the Oroville resident is also a mother of five.

Amidst the joys of family life loss and grief can come without warning, and parents must decide how best to comfort young children. Books can play a significant role in helping kids verbalize their loss and direct their imagination more positively.

“My Grandma Angel” ($17.99 in paperback from AuthorHouse; also for Amazon Kindle) by Lisa Rhoads DeLaby, illustrated by Dan Drewes, is a tender story based on LeLaby’s own experience. Told by a young girl, it begins in tears.

“My grandma died suddenly,” she says on the first page. “I didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye. She wasn’t sick, so I don’t know why she had to die and go to heaven.”

Then, “When I cried and told my mom I missed my grandma, she said it’s normal to feel really sad and cry when we lose someone we love. Mom gave me a big bear hug, squeezing me almost as hard as Grandma used to. It made me feel much better.”

Memories rush in, cooking and going to the movies.

There is something more. “The truth is, my grandma can now do things that she never could before. That’s because now she’s a special angel. I like to call her my Grandma Angel. My Grandma Angel can visit me in my dreams, now that she is in heaven.” And “she has all sorts of special powers.”

That cooling breeze? “That’s my Grandma Angel fanning me with one of her wings.” Rainbows are her way of saying hello. “During the day, I bet my grandma is doing good things to help others. She could be on a spy mission, saving the planet from harm, helping the Tooth Fairy, or sewing in Santa’s workshop with the elves.”

It’s the stuff of dreams, and in those dreams “Grandma and I can travel together anywhere….” “I’m happy that my Grandma Angel will always be in my heart and my dreams.” A series of questions on the last page asks about the reader’s own special angel.

Is that a smile I see?

“Death Comes For The Deconstructionist”

“Death Comes For The Deconstructionist” ($22 in hardcover from Slant; also for Amazon Kindle) by Daniel Taylor (WordTaylor.com) is a mystery. Who killed Richard Pratt, literary theorist extraordinaire?

Enter narrator Jon Mote, once one of Pratt’s students. Pratt’s wife hires him to investigate; she tells him: “I just feel like there’s something there to be seen that the police wouldn’t recognize if they tripped over it. I think you can help.”

So the quest begins. Mote is “on the wrong side of thirty-five, as our culture judges such things. I am separated from my wife, … living with my sister, who, despite substantial challenges, is far more acclimated to life than I am. … I get most of my opinions from cable television. … And, oh yes, I hear voices. They do not wish me well.”

His sister Judy, who has cognitive and linguistic disabilities, is the moral core of the novel. Her love for Jon goads him on when things go awry.

The first Mrs. Pratt recalls someone far different than the sophisticated scholar; “Dickie” Pratt grew up in the South and participated in the hanging of an African-American man (the local newspaper called it a “suicide”). After the divorce, he changed.

“He had converted to a new religion,” Jon realizes, “one that promised him a new kind of absolution from his sins, not least by dismissing the idea that there were sins to be absolved from. No fixed boundaries, no metanarratives, no sin, and voila, no guilt. It’s a game I am trying to play myself.”

This quirky and astute novel explores that “game” and what happens when the misguided deconstructionist finds freedom in “killing words.”

One who got angry at Pratt’s last lecture, Verity Jackson, tells Jon: “Dr. Pratt wasn’t just talking about Big Brother and God and most of the writers who have given me hope in life; he was also undermining Martin and Malcolm and Sojourner and Gandhi and anyone else who ever said, ‘This is wrong and things should be different.’ Words may just be play for him, but they aren’t play for people like me who depend on their stories.”

Verity, of course, means truth.

“The Game Warden’s Son”

Inspired by the success of his first book, “Badges, Bears, and Eagles,” Steven T. Callan is back with more. “The Game Warden’s Son” ($14.95 in paperback from Coffeetown Press; also for Amazon Kindle) “details over a half century of wildlife adventures and investigations, beginning with my storybook childhood as the son of a California Fish and Game warden.”

He spent his high school years in Orland, tagged along with his dad whenever he could, and became a warden in 1974. Later, he “spent the remainder of his thirty-year enforcement career in Redding.” You know he’d have stories to tell.

Callan (steventcallan.com) interviewed more than a dozen retired officers from Fish and Game (later renamed Fish and Wildlife). The stories, reconstructed from available evidence and memories, with a touch of “dramatic enhancement,” range from San Diego to Orland; Chico to Redding; and beyond.

He and other wardens wage a never-ending battle against poachers, whether abalone, bears, deer, eagles, and the list goes on.

Callan has a visceral reaction to depredation. He opened the trunk of one perp and “it took all of the professionalism I could muster not to turn around and slap the cuffs on the miscreant standing next to me. The entire trunk was filled with dead song birds: mockingbirds, thrashers, robins, meadowlarks, towhees, and a single male Bullock’s oriole”--all under legal protection. Why songbirds? “Birds like this are delicacy in old country,” says the man.

Then there are the “spotlighters” who “drive around shining their headlights or handheld, high-powered spotlights into the surrounding countryside until a pair of green eyes shines back. Bang! The deer is thrown into the trunk of a car or the bed of a pickup, and away they go.”

These are stories of wardens’ dogged determination, long stakeouts, and creative stings, all for the love of nature. As a tribute to Wally Callan, his son could do no better.

Callan is the scheduled interview guest on Nancy’s Bookshelf, with host Nancy Wiegman, this Friday at 10:00 a.m. on North State Public Radio (mynspr.org, KCHO 91.7 FM). He will be signing copies of his book at the Chico Costco on Saturday from 10:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m.

“Ishi Means Man”

Ishi “died of tuberculosis in 1916,” Thomas Merton writes, “after four and a half years among white men.” For the hundredth anniversary of Ishi’s death, Paulist Press has reprinted a small compilation of essays, written toward the end of Merton’s life, exploring the spiritual lives of the indigenous peoples of the West.

Merton, the influential Catholic writer, who died in 1968, entered a Trappist monastery in Kentucky in 1941. According to the Thomas Merton Center he became an activist in the civil rights and peace movements of the Sixties, drawing “severe criticism, from Catholics and non-Catholics alike, who assailed his political writings as unbecoming of a monk.”

“Ishi Means Man” ($9.95 in paperback from Paulist Press; also for Amazon Kindle) features a short introduction by Dorothy Day, who co-founded the Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933 to promote her radical economic ideas. Some of the essays were originally published in Day’s newspaper, as was the title piece.

Merton’s reflections on Ishi are shaped by Theodora Kroeber’s “Ishi In Two Worlds: A Biography Of The Last Wild Indian In North America,” published in 1964. “The Yana Indians,” he writes, “(including the Yahi or Mill Creeks) lived around the foothills of Mount Lassen, east of the Sacramento River. Their country came within a few miles of Vina where the Trappist monastery in California stands today.”

Merton sees Ishi’s story as a “parable.” Facing attacks, Ishi’s people retreated into the hills. “The Yahi remnant (and that phrase takes on haunting biblical resonances) systematically learned to live as invisible and unknown.”

Writing during the throes of the Vietnam conflict, Merton contrasts “the spectacle of our own country with its incomparable technological power, its unequalled material strength, its psychic turmoil, its moral confusion, and its profound heritage of guilt…. What is most significant is that Vietnam seems to have become an extension of our old western frontier, complete with enemies of another ‘inferior’ race.”

Ishi never revealed his actual name. “In the end, no one ever found out a single name of the vanished community. Not even Ishi’s. For Ishi simply means MAN.”

If Merton co-opted Ishi for his own political agenda, readers may still find his words worth pondering.

“How To Be Here”

The blurb for a new book is from Chico’s Aaron Rodgers: “Rob Bell has an incredible energy in his writing that is contagious. … Listing all the ways in which Rob has positively impacted my life would take up too much space; so I’ll simply say that he has inspired me to live life with a deeper level of appreciation and to love people with a greater awareness of our connectivity.”

In “How To Be Here” ($25.99 in hardcover from HarperOne; also for Amazon Kindle), Bell, a former pastor and now host of the weekly RobCast podcast (robbell.com), offers, as the subtitle says, “A Guide To Creating A Life Worth Living.”

He remembers trying to write a book. “The blinking line on that blank page kept blinking, like it was taunting me. There’s a reason it’s called a cursor. We all have a blinking line. Your blinking line is whatever sits in front of you waiting to be brought into existence.”

“The kind of life you lead,” he writes, “what you do with your time, how you spend your energies—it’s all part of how you create your life.” To make his point, Bell uses Biblical stories (focusing especially on Jesus) and contemporary illustrations, all suffused with encouragement and humor, like the reference to his high school neighbor Tad, “the drummer for the band Puddle Slug (they later changed their name to Rusty Kleenex to, you know, appeal to a wider audience)….”

Bell explores (and exposes) the dead ends we find ourselves facing. How do we creatively deal with suffering, rejection, burnout? In nine sections, some with colorful titles like “The Dickie Factor” and “The Exploding Burrito,” the author proposes creating a life shaped by rest (the rhythm of the sabbath) with emphasis on the first step (“we don’t take the first step because we can’t figure out the seventeenth step”). So “start with 1.”

He introduces the Japanese word ikigai, meaning “your vocation, your destiny, your path. Your ikigai is your reason for being.”

“Try that new thing. If it helps clarify your ikigai, if it gets you up in the morning, if it’s good for you and the world, do it.”

“Illuminate: Ignite Change Through Speeches, Stories, Ceremonies, And Symbols”

In its quarter century, Duarte, Inc., a Silicon Valley design shop (with an office in Chico for a time), has often reinvented its services. CEO Nancy Duarte realized the creation of slide presentations for companies was just not sustainable.

Her TEDx talk on storytelling a few years ago garnered a million views, and Duarte scrambled to meet the demand for new designs. Recently, the company underwent reorganization, and that process, warts and all, forms the basis of Duarte’s new book, co-authored with colleague Patti Sanchez.

“Illuminate: Ignite Change Through Speeches, Stories, Ceremonies, And Symbols” ($32 in hardcover from Portfolio/Penguin; also for Amazon Kindle) is all about the journey of what the authors call “the torchbearer.” “Torchbearers,” they write, “communicate in a way that conquers fear and inspires hope.” (A book sample is available from duarte.com.)

Duarte is a visionary, but she admits that it’s hard to see how others might take her words. Enter Sanchez, who brings an empathetic understanding. Together they invite the leader to journey through the five-step “venture scape,” which is structured like a story. At the Dream Stage, “your travelers face a choice to stay put or believe they play an important role in making your new dream come true.”

But then comes the Leap Stage, a realization that the status quo is over. The Fight Stage means travelers must fend off opposition, only to be presented with the Climb Stage where they must gather their energy to “climb out of the pit.” The process repeats until the Arrive Stage where travelers “seize the reward you’ve promised and are celebrated for their efforts.”

All along the way, the book presents case studies of companies (from Chick-fil-A to Starbucks) and leaders who have used not just speeches and stories, but ceremonies (which “help travelers envision new behavior or purge old mind-sets”) and symbols (“visual, auditory, spatial, and physical means to create emotionally charged artifacts that remind your travelers of key moments along the venture”). Symbols can include images on a banner, bells, music, historic locations, hugs and dancing.

New dreams may be born. “When you discover a new ember,” Duarte writes, “let there be light.”

“The Boy From The Mountains Beyond”

Lynn Elliott, playwright and Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at Chico State University, published a sweet tale in 2010 that only recently came to my attention. With illustrations by former Chico State student Luis A. Santos, the book is the story of Roye, “the master toymaker,” who finds a most unlikely protégé.

In “The Boy From The Mountains Beyond” ($10.95 in paperback from Stansbury Publishing), Roye remembers when travelers would stop and marvel at the toys: “Wooden rocking horses, … puzzles that covered the floor, and puppets of all shapes and sizes—all were bought in my toyshop and placed in the wagons that followed the carriages.”

And more memories: “After evening prayers in the Carmelite Convent on the hill, some of nuns stole down to the village and peeked through the window of my shop. They giggled as the flickering candles danced over the wooden spinning tops. … Then, while the children of the village slept on Christmas Eve, I stopped at every home and placed a special toy for each child beneath the Christmas tree.”

Now, though, the shop is empty. Roye’s fingers have become unusable since he threw a village child to safety as a wagon hurled down a hill and ran over his hands. Roye and his daughter Claire, cared for by the nuns after Claire’s mother died in childbirth, face an uncertain future--though Claire’s exquisite singing brightens the hearts of everyone.

But one November day Claire disappears into the woods and Roye sets out to find her. He sees her half-empty basket. “Beside it I saw Claire’s footprints in the snow. Then my heart froze. Next to Claire’s footprints were the unmistakable paw prints of a wolf forcing her forward into the forest.”

But the yellow-eyed wolf is a guardian, shielding a small boy who had run into the woods to escape a war that had taken his parents. The boy, Trystan by name, is carried into town, and, as time passes, wouldn’t you know it? He shows great dexterity with his hands, cutting and chiseling wood as Roye guides him. You can practically feel the joy, and the gift of the wolf.

“Peace Like A River”

I have to thank a longtime Chico friend, now living in Livermore, for recommending an extraordinary novel, a best seller when it was published in 2001.

“Peace Like A River” ($16 in paperback from Grove/Atlantic; also for Amazon Kindle) by Leif Enger takes place in the early Sixties, mostly in Minnesota and North Dakota. Enger, raised in Osakis, Minnesota, became a reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio. “Peace” is a story of faith and doubt, of the miraculous and the mundane, bloodshed and redemption. And, oh, the words.

It is 1962. Jeremiah Land lives with his three children in Minnesota, Davy, the oldest at 16; Reuben, 11; and Swede, just 9. Told by a much older Reuben, looking back, the story begins with Reuben’s troubled birth and an account of the first of Jeremiah’s miracles.

The baby is not breathing, despite the best efforts of Dr. Nokes. Jeremiah smacks the doctor aside; “Dad turned back to me, a clay child wrapped in a canvas coat, and said in a normal voice, ‘Reuben Land, in the name of the living God I am telling you to breathe.’” And he does.

Why was Reuben allowed to survive, plagued now by asthma? “I believe I was preserved, through those twelve airless minutes, in order to be a witness, and as a witness, let me say that a miracle is no cute thing but more like the swing of a sword. … Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It’s true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. … When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth.”

Yet the story is anchored to the earth and is shaped by the snowy landscape. One horrible night, as two bullies enter the Lands’ house, Davy is ready with his rifle, and kills them both.

There is evidence that this was not self-defense, and Davy is jailed, but escapes to the Badlands. And so begins a quest to find Davy. Justice and mercy co-mingle in a story as fragile as human life and as strong as Easter.

“At The Corner Of Fleeheart And Pig Turd Alley”

Something strange about Dave Kilbourne, the former longtime Executive Director of the Downtown Chico Business Association. The back cover of his new book says he was “raised up on historic Pawleys Island, which is only loosely attached to the South Carolina low country by the scenic Fiddler Crab Bridge. In his early teens his family relocated upstate to beautiful Aiken where he spent his formative years growing up as a free-range child.”

What’s strange is that the hero of his new novel, Dante Valentime Delancy, a totally fictional creation, shares exactly the same pedigree. He also shares the same penchant as his author for free-range behavior and a love of jokes that one might hear at a drinking establishment. Kilbourne frequents the Sierra Nevada Taproom where much of the book was written; and Dante might show up there yet.

Speaking of devil-may-care Dante, the tone of his life’s story is ably captured by the title of Kilbourne’s novel, “At The Corner Of Fleeheart And Pig Turd Alley” ($14.95 in paperback from Flying Pig Press; available locally at Made In Chico). The cover signpost is a real place, “an actual address in ‘downtown’ Amador City over there by Jackson and Sutter Creek.” In the story the signs are moved to Aiken, and there at the corner sits the Palace Flophouse Pub and Casino Royalé Grille where reside “happy young bachelors all in their mid-twenties,” including Dante and his brother, Mather Lee Delancy.

The book is subtitled “Twenty-Five Acts Of Literary Mischief” and recounts not only Dante’s life but that of his mother, Miss Monsarrat Feliciana Delancy and his father, Clancy “Boomer” Delancy, a “self-certified soothsayer and pyramidologist. … While residing under the same roof, and watching the same I Love Lucy and Ed Sullivan Variety Hour shows, Dante lived with someone who firmly believed the Egyptian pyramids were constructed by beneficent aliens from outer space.”

Dante would go on to serve his country in many ways, from becoming a Clemson (“Go Tigers!”) forestry student to “wrangling various reptiles and serpents in the Savannah River Swamp,” becoming a tenured “Associate Professor of Crocodilian Studies.”

When it comes to pouring out the stories, Kilbourne is no half-pint.

“Mattie Celi”

What does it feel like to be a foster kid? Stirling City writer M. Elizabeth Schaefer knows first-hand; according to her website (melizabethschaefer-author.com) she spent most of her teen years in foster care. It was a world of uncertainty, one also experienced by the heroine of her first novel.

“Mattie Celi” ($12.95 in paperback from Outskirts Press) is a 14-year-old growing up in Simi Valley, California in 2006 with three brothers and a younger sister. Her stepfather is an alcoholic, physically battering his wife and children and sexually abusing her, and her mother fails to protect her family from what Mattie calls “the old man” (never dignifying him with a name).

The story is told by Mattie herself (whose last name is pronounced “Chellie”). She is befriended by her neighbor, Mrs. Outen, and by Mrs. Astor from Social Services. They remain her lifeline.

Mattie finds herself in a series of foster homes. Though statistically at high risk, something inside her aspires to surmount the odds. Leaving the Savoys, she reflects:

“I’m headed to foster home number four. I wondered what it was going to be like to be the only kid in a big house. I wanted to talk to Mrs. Astor about my feelings of depression. I wanted to tell her that I blew up at the Savoys, but she was in a hurry, as usual. I felt numb. I hoped Mrs. McNeedy wouldn’t be as weird as she looked.” But she is.

Eventually Mattie is fostered by the Changs, and she and their daughter become fast friends. By her eighteenth birthday, when Mattie is ready to move out on her own, she realizes her intense “anger waned after forgiving the old man, my real father, and most of all, my mother.” Rather than feel “there’s goes another piece of my life” as she leaves each foster home, now there is hope, the “start to a new piece of my life!”

The author will be interviewed by Nancy Wiegman on Nancy’s Bookshelf this Friday, February 26, at 10:00 a.m. on North State Public Radio, 91.7 FM or mynspr.org. She will be signing books at Barnes and Noble in Chico this Saturday at 2:00 p.m.

“A Survey Of Language And Culture: Linguistic Anthropology And Cross-Cultural Communication”

Mike Findlay, longtime Butte College anthropology instructor (and my colleague), is a man full of liver. As he points out in his new textbook, while the reference doesn’t make sense to most English speakers, for many in Asia “the liver is associated metaphorically with life because it filters harmful substances.” Those in the US might instead refer to the heart. Such “lexical choice” is made within a cultural context. And that’s what Findlay explores.

“A Survey Of Language And Culture: Linguistic Anthropology And Cross-Cultural Communication” ($64.95 in paperback from Cognella Academic Publishing, bit.ly/1KdNG9T; also at select libraries) is accessible to the general reader. (Disclosure: I formatted an earlier version of the book.) Linguistic anthropology looks not only at physical aspects of human language (fricatives and palatals and plosives, oh my!), but also language and the development of writing and how language and culture interact.

It’s clear, Findlay writes, that there is no “primitive” language, one that lacks complexity or subtlety. The book is replete with case studies, not only about the complexity of language, but the challenges one culture faces in “decoding” another.

“On one occasion I observed a student teacher working with four Hmong girls” who were learning English. At one point the teacher decided to introduce a math question and asked the girls which they’d rather have, one-third of a dozen cookies or two-thirds. The students, who didn’t realize it was a math question, said they wanted one-third. The teacher was perplexed. Did the students not understand that two-thirds is bigger than one-third? Of course they did, but “the original question had asked the girls for their preference…. For the Hmong, taking the larger amount is considered rude.”

Another example: Languages that depend on “pitch, tone, stress, sound duration, pause, and silence can cause misinterpretations. For instance, in some parts of China a mere conversation can be loud—even boisterous—to a point where outsiders might think that an argument is taking place.”

The upshot for Findlay is that “the importance of recognizing that language is culturally patterned brings us to the heart (or liver) of this overall discussion.” Findlay is an illuminating guide.

“The Liberty Club”

Marianne Aleck, born and raised in Oroville and now living in Rio Vista, realized that recordings of her parents made in the 1980s could form the basis of an extraordinary story. Coupled with diligent research and a long delayed desire to write, Aleck has produced a family history in which the central characters come alive.

“The Liberty Club” ($25 in paperback, self-published; also for Amazon Kindle; facebook.com/thelibertyclubbook) spans a century. “Much of it,” she writes, “takes place in Oroville … with the immigration of my Greek ancestors, while I weave throughout my French ancestors still living in France during the same era.  I cover the true life stories of my family during WWI, The Great Depression” and WWII.

Marianne’s grandfather, Konstantinos Alexiou, came to the U.S. and changed his name to Gus Aleck. Arriving in Oroville in 1906, he found a bustling town and, with a business partner, eventually bought a bar on Montgomery Street.

“My grandpa named their new venture, ‘The Liberty Club’ which provided an escape from the woes of the Depression. … It was a time to hoist your pints and cheer to the smallest of good fortunes.”

Johnny, Marianne’s father, was born to Gus and his wife Angelica in 1924. He became a paratrooper in World War II and met his future wife, Monique, in France. Love blossomed; as Monique tells it, “he wanted to kiss me. And naturally, being raised the way I was Catholic, I thought I’d go to hell if I kissed a soldier or anyone else. You don’t kiss a boy unless you are going to get married. So, I told him. I’m sure he thought I was nuts. But he said, ‘Oh, okay then we’ll get married.’ And he kissed me. And that’s the way we were engaged.”

There were incredible strains to the marriage, yet life continued when the couple settled in Oroville. Later a great tragedy would befall the family, one covered by the Oroville Mercury.

As a tribute to her mother, in 2012 Marianne “became a card carrying French citizen” and now holds dual citizenship. Rich in detail, the book reveals historic Oroville and revels in the imperfect lives that energized it.

“Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education”

Ken Robinson’s TED Talk in 2006, on “How Schools Kill Creativity,” has been viewed more than thirty-three million times. The most persistent question he’s received since then has been: What can be done? Though he’s explored creativity in subsequent writing, his new book presents his most comprehensive answer.

“Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education,” by Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica ($27.95 in hardcover from Viking; also for Amazon Kindle; Robinson himself narrates the audio version) is really about farming. “In organic farming,” he writes, “the focus is not only on output, it is on the vitality of the soil and the quality of the environment on which natural, sustainable growth depends. In education, natural, sustainable learning depends on the culture of the school and the quality of the learning environment.”

Through dozens of illustrations, mostly focusing on grade schools, it’s clear that “revolution” is really about incremental change from within--along with changing certain policies from without.

Those policies that he deems most harmful have instituted a culture of standardized testing which, he says, is a holdover from the industrial revolution. “The upshot is that our school systems are now a matrix of organizational rituals and intellectual habits that do not adequately reflect the great variety of talents of the students who attend them.”

But this doesn’t mean doing away with standards. “Creative work in any domain,” he writes, “involves increasing control of the knowledge, concepts, and practices that have shaped that domain and a deepening understanding of the traditions and achievements in which it is based.” What’s missing is personalization.

Schools can maintain high standards but also enable students to bring their diverse talents to what they are passionate about. By the end of the book, it really does seem possible.

Sir Ken Robinson (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2003) will be speaking at Chico State University’s Laxson Auditorium on Tuesday, February 9 at 7:30 p.m. as part of the university’s Presidential Lecture Series. Tickets are available through Chico Performances, online at bit.ly/1WOzCFm or by phone at (530) 898-6333. They’re $25 for adults, $23 for Seniors, and $10 for youth and Chico State students.

“48,000,000 Colombians Can’t Be Wrong: Finding Love In The Land Of Shakira, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fernando Botero And Sofia Vergara”

As he tells it, former Chicoan Brian Ward was a single man in search of love. So why not find it in Bogotá, Colombia? His life there is, as he puts it, “the true adventure story about a 37-year-old socially-awkward man who decided that the best way he could deal with a life sentence of microwavable burritos and 10-hour Facebook marathons was to look online for a girlfriend in Colombia and then to hop on a flight to Colombia’s capital in pursuit of a woman he has never met.”

He chronicled those experiences in his blog (singleabroad.wordpress.com) which has become the basis of his new book, “48,000,000 Colombians Can’t Be Wrong: Finding Love In The Land Of Shakira, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fernando Botero And Sofia Vergara” ($9.99 in paperback, self-published, available through Amazon).

Before he went to Colombia, he decided to use an online dating site to line up some prospects there. “Once I got registered, a standard question I was asked by the female members on ColombianCupid.com was, ‘What is your job?’ I always made a point of answering this question the following way, ‘I paint fences for a living.’ No matter what your employment status is, the best strategy is to never to make yourself sound rich or important. This is a highly effective way to reduce the number women emailing you who are just looking for a sugar daddy.”

One of those contacts became his girlfriend in Bogotá, and that’s just the start of the story. Along the way the author finds lodging at a hostel in the La Candelaria section of the capital, where “walking the streets of Bogotá at night is hazardous, mainly because of the enormous amount of potholes, uneven sidewalks and missing manhole covers.”

He earns some money by being an extra in TV shows and movies, getting fifty dollars for a 3-second walk-on as a cop. “It is a job,” he says, “that is easily done (and probably preferably done) while drunk.”

He not only finds a gig teaching English, and writing for a newspaper--but marriage as well.

“In DeLorean’s Shadow”

Paradise author Stephen Arrington is, at this writing, “on the short list for a presidential pardon.” Just how that came to be is told in Arrington’s new memoir, “In DeLorean’s Shadow: The Drug Trial Of The Century By The Sole Surviving Defendant” (in Amazon Kindle ebook from Drugs Bite Publishing, drugsbite.com).

When automaker John Z. DeLorean, whose DMC-12 was featured in the movie Back To The Future, was arrested, he “was charged,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “with conspiring to distribute $24 million in cocaine in 1982 in an attempt to salvage his flailing company.”

There were two codefendants. Morgan Hetrick, writes Arrington, “was an aviation-engineering genius. … Seven years before the troubles, I taught him to SCUBA dive. Originally, Morgan was like a father figure, but then he turned into a mentor gone bad. He claimed to be the #1 cocaine smuggler on the West Coast.”

And Arrington: “A Vietnam vet, Navy bomb disposal frogman proudly serving his country until an addiction to marijuana in Hawaii flushed my naval career and life down a toilet.”

DeLorean was eventually acquitted, but Arrington, Hetrick’s unfortunate sidekick, was sent to Terminal Island Federal prison for half a decade. He refused to be a snitch. In the book he explains why DeLorean was not guilty.

His good behavior and extraordinary skills (from diving to firefighting to nurturing a small patch of green grass in the prison yard), and his appearance in the Doonesbury comic strip, opened opportunities both inside the wall and out. He saved a man’s life; he became a chief diver for the Cousteau Society; and he married Cindy (proposing in a parking garage standing in a puddle of oil).

Becoming a Christian in prison began to reorient his life and produced a growing conviction “to talk with youth about hope,” “the kind of hope that changes lives,” coupled with the development of “discipline, commitment, fitness, a desire and intent to succeed, pursuit of adventure.” The story he tells is very human, inviting, invigorating and most assuredly hopeful.  

Arrington is a scheduled interview guest on Nancy’s Bookshelf, hosted by Nancy Wiegman, this Friday at 10:00 a.m. on North State Public Radio (91.7 FM, KCHO; mynspr.org).

“Fracking Justice”

“My usual mode of fiction writing,” notes Michael J. Fitzgerald on his blog (michaeljfitzgerald.blogspot.com), “is to start a story and run with it--just as fast as I can think and type. There are no long hiatuses or thumb sucking. I just keep the story moving.”

The result is a series of suspense novels (starting with “The Fracking War”) which draw on his journalism background to probe what Big Energy is doing to local communities in extracting natural gas from “hydraulic fracturing.” Fitzgerald’s alter ego in “Fracking Justice” ($16.95 in paperback from Mill City Press; also for Amazon Kindle) is Jack Stafford, editor of the Horseheads Clarion, a small town newspaper in New York near the Pennsylvania border.

In one of his weekly editorials Stafford writes: “This newspaper has chronicled the power and influence of the energy lobby and energy companies for years, pointing out how that power and influence got energy companies exemptions from federal clean water and clean air acts. Those exemptions opened the door to hydrofracking for oil and natural gas, arguably the greatest manmade threat to our environment we have ever faced.”

Fitzgerald, who worked briefly at the E-R decades ago, now lives with his journalist wife Sylvia Fox in Mexico, the Finger Lakes area of Central New York, and California.

The focus of the newspaper investigation is Rockwell Valley, just across the New York border in Pennsylvania, where Grand Energy Services (GES) is building “a salt cavern storage of propane and natural gas.” GES is bringing jobs to the community but it’s also buying up local officials (the mayor is a GES employee).

At the same time Stafford is reeling over the loss of his wife in a boating accident, caring for his young son Noah who seems to have lost his hearing, and wondering what will become of his relationship with Cass, one of his wife’s sisters, who has come to New York to care for Noah.

There’s also the story of the Rockwell Valley Sheriff, Melvin “Bobo” Caprino, who must choose between loyalty to GES and loyalty to his conscience. The action never stops, and the explosive ending will have readers pondering the “ripped from the headlines” consequences.

“The Lassen Peak Eruptions & Their Lingering Legacy”

“People had believed that Lassen Peak, a 10,457-foot high mountain, was an extinct volcano…. Then on May 19, 1915, a great eruption with lava caused a massive mudflow down the northeastern slope of the peak, unleashing damage and destruction onto Hat Creek Valley below.”

Lassen had “reawakened” earlier, on May 30, 1914, when it began to emit steam and black smoke. Elmer Sorahan, riding toward Susanville, looked up “and was moved to casually comment to his riding companion, ‘Looks like Mt. Lassen’s erupting.’”

Alan Willendrup of Roseville interviewed eyewitnesses for research on Lassen Peak forty years ago. Now, thanks to the Association for Northern California Historical Research, based at Chico State University, Willendrup’s work has been reissued and enhanced. “The Lassen Peak Eruptions & Their Lingering Legacy” ($19.95 in paperback from ANCHR, www.csuchico.edu/anchr) covers geology; the “First and Second Americans”; the eruptions and their aftermath. (Copies are available at The Bookstore in Chico, Discount Books in Oroville, and My Girlfriend’s Closet in Paradise.)

It’s a beautifully-written narrative, told with the human touch and a keen eye to set the record straight in the wake of wildly exaggerated newspaper stories.

No one died as a direct result of the eruptions, but there were some close calls and life in the areas below the peak would never be the same. The Shasta County Fair in 1915 featured “the only real live volcano in the United States”; and Charles E. Kunkle of Chico blamed Lassen for causing heavy spring rains that year.

It's clear from his laconic observation that “Sorahan knew nothing of the significance that this initial eruption would later have on his life. In less than a year, he would literally be running for his life from a fast advancing mudflow roaring down from the slopes of Lassen Peak on a path of destruction toward his small homestead in the Hat Creek Valley. But having no crystal ball, Sorahan and his companion were content to maintain their leisurely trot back to Susanville.”

Today? “One hundred years later, as the descendants of these incredibly resilient people live out their lives at the foot of Lassen Peak, the mountain sleeps—for now.”

“Clarissa; Or, The History Of A Young Lady”

In 1962, a columnist in the Florence, Alabama, Times wrote that “the longest popular novel ever published was ‘Clarissa Harlowe,’ turned out by Samuel Richardson in 1748. It ran to 984,870 words.” Proust wrote more, but the Penguin Classics print edition runs to 1500 pages of footnote-sized print, so it’s big.

Three years ago, your Biblio File columnist embarked on a journey to read that big book. I was intrigued by a study, published in 1994 by Chico State University English Professor Lois Bueler, called “Clarissa’s Plots” (out of print but available in selected libraries). Bueler contends that Richardson’s novel blends three kinds of plots, the Tested Woman Plot, the Don Juan Plot, and the Prudence Plot.

The plots thickened, indeed. But to appreciate Bueler, I had to read Richardson. Almost a thousand days ago I signed up for email excerpts from Daily Lit (dailylit.com, which has recently experienced technical issues). Every day, in my inbox, a thousand words of Clarissa. Which seemed fitting, since the book is an epistolary novel, told entirely in letters, mostly from near-saintly Clarissa Harlowe and her best friend, Anna Howe; and Robert Lovelace, a dashing rake and his best friend John Belford, a fellow libertine who would undergo an extraordinary “amendment” of his life.

Unwilling to marry the disgusting-but-rich Roger Solmes, Clarissa is duped by rival suitor Lovelace, runs away with him to avoid imminent violence, and is taken to a safe house. Which turns out to be Lovelace’s favorite brothel. She is drugged and raped, shunned by family and friends, and, mortified beyond measure, prepares for her death. Tragedies abound, even among the virtuous.

Richardson’s is a tale of moral instruction “in an age,” he writes, “given up to diversion and entertainment.” But his characters live, and breathe, and capture the heart. The action moves slowly (the great Dr. Johnson wrote: “if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself”) but is perfectly suited to bite-sized email. 

The last letter is dated December 18. And so the novel ends, and with it, the year. It is hard to say adieu.