Lazy Days for Reading
Traditionally I spend Memorial Day in New Hampshire. The first grilled hamburger and walk on the beach, and at least a day of cleaning patio furniture. This year, with a busy travel schedule, I decided to stay in New York.
Summer weekends in the City are glorious as many people leave, particularly when one can extend being away to three or four days. The many visitors here are confined to the places on their lists of what to see and do in Manhattan: The High Line, Ground Zero, the Empire State Building, and the Statue of Liberty seem to be the priority. The neighborhood where I live is calm and unusually quiet. Construction stops. Deliveries and large trucks thundering over uneven pavement comes to a complete halt. There are still sirens, but not as many breaking the silence throughout day.
I took the opportunity of this time to visit a few museum exhibitions. At the Museum of Modern Art an exhibit entitled: Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, that focuses on the achievements of women artists between the end of World War II (1945) and the start of the Feminist movement (around 1968). At the Jewish Museum, there is a fascinating exhibition that looks at the work of the modernist painter, designer, and poet Florine Stettheimer.
The Brooklyn Museum currently has on view the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe with various portraits taken by well-known photographers and then hanging next to these portraits are her clothes. She wore and was photographed, almost exclusively, in black and white. Black suits. Lovely white blouses. Black coats and capes, many designed for her. A day dress she bought at Neiman-Marcus she found so comfortable she had a local dressmaker in Santa Fe copy it in several colors and they are exhibited together on a hanger. One did not see her photographed in these dresses. It was not my intention to just visit shows dedicated to women, it is that the art world is recognizing women were often left out of the major institutions.
However, the highlight of the weekend was an opportunity to attend the annual Memorial Day Concert at Cathedral of St. John the Divine. This is the twenty-fifth year the New York Philharmonic has performed at the Cathedral in a concert that is free and open to the public. I was fortunate enough to have tickets and seats just a few rows from the orchestra. Under the director of Alan Gilbert, the Philharmonic performed Mahler’s Symphony No. 4. The poetry/verse in the piece was sung by Ying Fang, a Soprano.
The Right Reverend Clifton Daniel, III, the Interim Dean, reminded everyone, in his opening remarks, that “music is prayer and possibly as close to God as one can get.” Ending Memorial Day in this sacred place, surrounded by music, friendship and peace seems to symbolize the real meaning of Memorial Day.
Another Memorial Day ritual is to compile a summer reading list.
Colm Toibin’s new book House of Names (Viking, 2017) is at the top of my list. He is the author of Brooklyn, The Master, Heather Blazing and many more. One can read his work as much for the brilliance of the writing as for the narrative.
The new biography of Elizabeth Bishop has received mixed reviews, but the life of this American woman/poet and artist fascinates me. Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) will be high on the list.
I’m always interested in novels that receive the Man Booker Prize for literary fiction and the 2016 book was Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2015).
Pachinko (HarperCollins, 2017) by Min Jin Lee has been recommended by friends and I have had an opportunity to meet her. Ms. Lee immigrated to the United States with her family as a child. In this novel, she writes about Koreans being discriminated against by the Japanese.
Of course, summer is the time when you want a book you can just carry to the beach and get lost in the story. I have a few favorites:
You are never too old to re-read Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, the enchanting story of an orphan girl being brought up on Prince Edward Island.
Bill Bryson’s books always delight. A Walk in the Woods was written when he lived in Hanover, New Hampshire and it provides a sense of place when reading it looking across at a mountain landscape.
Truman Capote’s charming book Breakfast at Tiffany’s still brings a smile on a rainy day, perhaps reading it wrapped in a blanket on a damp porch, trying to avoid a summer chill.
We all have different taste in books and each of us has a category of literature we prefer. The Laconia Public Library, The Meredith Public Library, and the Gilford Public Library have librarians who can recommend books that will keep you engaged.
In the words of C.S. Lewis – “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”