Charlotte's garden of reading in 2024

Our order arrives. Chie is having tempura soba while I have a bowl of udon noodles with seasoned deep-fried tofu.

I hear books aren't selling as well any more, and bookshops are disappearing, I say conversationally, holding the tofu under the broth with my chopsticks to soak up the flavours.

Chie's face clouds over. 'Stop it. When everybody says that, as if they know what they're talking about, it turns into a trend. Books will always be essential for some people. And book- shops are a place for those people to discover the books that will become important to them. I will never allow bookshops to vanish from this world,' she finishes, noisily sucking up a mouthful of soba.

Amy poured out the coffee. "But he didn't have to pay anything at all. That says something. And then he hopped a plane here in the middle of the playoffs to fix my problem. Kind of like Darcy bailing out Wickham." Her face registered shock. "Aw, hell, am I Lydia?"

And now it came up, came near; and there was something in the shining glimpse, the liquid black eye of the fish gazing up at her as it passed out of the shadow into the light, that made her say, Yes, aloud, and gasp. There was an element in the trembling intensity of this vision so unlike the other most dazzling moments of her life that, for a breath, it pierced the little cloud of dullness in which she normally moved through her days. And it seemed to her that she could almost see something now moving beneath the every- day, the daily, the gray and oppressive stuff of the self, something more like an intricate geometry that lived beneath the surface of the material world. And this swift and gorgeous and too-rare strike to the heart was just like when one of the goldsmith's apprentices beat and beat at a tiny lump of gold until all across the marble table on which they worked an astonishing thin leaf of gold spread outward; the vividest moments were when the leaf gently tore and one could see the cold sharp veins of the marble before the leaf was healed again by beating.
After this moment, she found herself ever so slightly changed.

Since you remain reluctant, let us imagine
that one's selfhood is a work of art - a maquette
in clay, as may be, and each life event
enacted by the sculptor. In he creeps
to the damp-room on his crepe-soled shoes
again and again. In time the work proceeds via a series of flukes and inspirations...

her beautiful face shining in the sunlight that glowed into the store window, the light bouncing off the fruit and vegetables and cascading into the corners of the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, illuminating the peppers and carrots, the Saltines and apple peelers, making life seem as full and new and fresh as the promise of Pennsylvania had once been for so many of those standing about who had come up from the South to the North, a land of supposed good, clean freedom, where a man could be a man and a woman could be a woman, instead of the reality where they now stood, a tight cluster of homes enclosed by the filth of factories that belched bitter smoke into a gray sky and tight yards filled with goats and chickens in a part of town no one wanted, in homes with no running water or bathrooms. Living like they were down home. Except they weren't down home. They were up home. And it was the same.

if you could not hide a secret here, then where? The loch was so long, and so deep and so dark that a man might go in and the waters pass over him so that it was as if he had never been. Who would see? The mountains looking down from either side were silent, immovable, and the glens and peoples they hid might almost be unguessed at. For a moment lain had the mad thought that they would get to the other side of the loch and discover that nothing of the past years had ever been no rising, no marching, no battles, no vengeance, no loss.

if they knew that the end was nigh, they would relish what of life was left or they would just have another meeting about it. If she was in charge (she was, she reminded herself), she would do away with meetings, do away with offices, for that matter, and let everyone work from home. How would you go about that? she wondered.

His alarm?"
"Yeah. We have these gadgets that tell you when you've had your quota of radiation exposure for the day. You'd never get the job done if you paid any attention to the stupid things so we had our own little workarounds. Looking back on it, probably wasn't the smartest thing to do! Anyway, what's old Yokoyama up to these days?"
"We don't know. That's what we're trying to find out."
"Hope he's hale and hearty-but I doubt he is."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because we're the dregs."
"The dregs?"
"Fuel ain't the only thing nuclear power stations need. Those places, they eat up uranium, but they also eat up people. That's how they keep going. Oh yeah, they need their human sacrifices. We manual laborers, we have the life sucked out of us. You can see it. Just look at me. I'm scrap, scum, leftovers."

A headline grabbed my attention: 'Expatriation: The Countries Most Attractive to French Youths.....

The word expatriation intrigued me, especially as a few pages later in the same newspaper, another article lamented 'the tragedy of illegal immigration': 140 sub-Saharan African nationals, dead from thirst in the Libyan desert. I opened the dictionary. I needed to clear up this linguistic mystery. Why are some people expatriates, while others migrate, emigrate or immigrate? Reading the various definitions just confused me further. The words had almost the same meaning. Expatriation means you migrate to another country. When you leave, you emigrate, and when you arrive, you immigrate. And then a detail jumped out: in French, one expatriates oneself, s'expatrier - that s' changes everything. Expatriate oneself, a pronominal verb conjugated with a personal reflexive pronoun. I expatriate myself: I have held Conference with myself, weighed the pros and cons and decided to deport myself elsewhere! This is a choice: an act of will, not of fire under your bottom. When I migrate, I do not have a choice. It is the winds of poverty or of war that push me out of my home.

"I like this place." She waved her newspaper expansively as she sat down. "The garden's lovely."
"It would be lovely if it didn't have a poisonous tree in it," I said.
At this, she looked around in alarm. "What poisonous tree?"
"The one you were sitting under. Cascabela thevetia, yellow oleander. I have no idea why people insist on putting it in café gardens. The flowers, leaves and seeds contain digitoxin, which slows the heartbeat."
She stared at the tree on the other side of the garden. "Is that dangerous?"
"Ingesting a single seed slows the heartbeat...to a stop."
"Goodness! Should we tell someone?"
"There's no point. In my experience they don't seem to care."

In this work, which has become one of the classics of the modern feminist dramatic repertoire, seven African American women discussed their experiences of racism and sexism in society, and the creative strategies they devised to counter them. One of the characters, the 'Lady in Brown', spoke of her mind-blowing discovery of Toussaint Louverture as an eight- yearold child from St Louis. After entering a reading contest in her local library, she was swept away by how Toussaint had freed Haiti from slavery 'wid the spirits of ol dead africans from outta the ground'. Because she had found the book about Toussaint in the 'adult reading room', however, she was disqualified from the competition. The disappointment only compounded her fixation with her hero: 'he waz dead & livin to me'.

I am haunted by a book that I found the first time I visited Ober's island. It was stuck away in a corner of a little cabin I haven't described, one devoted to books alone, the library. My find was a little pamphlet-sized inconsequential-looking book covered with a black paper that looked like oilcloth. I slipped it from the shelf and opened it. Tristram Shandy. The first novel in the English language. As it was originally published in serial form this was but a portion of the first edition and first printing. Laurence Sterne had signed the title page. I had a strange, covetous, Golum-like feeling as I held the book, my precious. I suppose it was the beginning of the sort of emotional response to books that drives those collectors you hear about, occasionally, to fill their apartments with books until there are only book tunnels to walk through and the floors eventually collapse down onto their neighbors.

Of course, I have to see Tristram Shandy again.

Didn't you tell me once that pear trees are agitated by lightning somehow? Don't they come through the window?" All year long we stare out this window-the tissue-thin blossoms, the birds, the cherries and the apples, the bright-red autumn, the sweep of snow, the result- ing mud, and then the blossoms again. French Impressionism has nothing on our view. We put the window in when we expanded the kitchen and built the family room. Michigan farmers like houses they can keep warm, and so for months we debated the question of warmth versus beauty and in the end beauty won. Neighbors come into this room and shake their heads at such decadence.

We had no idea of the problems that had plagued our parents' marriage in recent months. We didn't even know who ran the country. We lived under the weird dictatorship of childhood: we looked but didn't see, listened but understood nothing, spoke and were largely ignored. But we were happy under that regime. Like a thick shroud, the fabric of our young lives shielded us completely.

After the war, women in orthodox Jewish families had made it their mission to have as many children as possible to replenish the population-and it seemed to me that the same was true for books. That subconscious drive to write as many books as possible, to fill those places left empty on the library shelves, not just by the books burned during the war, but by the ones whose authors had died before they could write them.

"Do you think we'll find it?" asked Rico.
The Schoolmaster, whose words had weight, replied amid silence: "The information is solid. The Comandante has been on the spot for ten years. He had the secret location from the lips of old Liberto himself - the very one who dug the hole."
After this pronouncement in the Schoolmaster's authoritative tone the issue never came up again. It was as though any further doubts would somehow jinx the operation. The Schoolmaster, who owed this sobriquet to having trained organizers at the union, had handed out a few copies of L'Espoir, a paper that everyone took but nobody read - the news was always too bad; and today, as ever, the only subject was betrayals and bad turns of events.

They were let in through a locked door at the end of the row of windows, and the supervisor gathered a ring of clerks around them to study the photo.

'What would he have been wearing?' she asked, with a quelling glance.

Barrow covered Sammy's body with his hand, so only the grinning, rat-like face showed. 'Cheap suit, probably a hat with some kind of loud band round it,' he said.

'Oh yes,' said a middle-aged male clerk with a fastidious air. 'I remember him. Positively garish. Orange stripes round the hat, and a tie to match. I noticed him because the outfit was not refined, or first-class in any way, and yet he bought a Pullman ticket. Which is not the usual combination. He was very pleased with himself What do you want him for, crimes against fashion?'
'Or possibly somethin' even more serious,' said Drummond.

Money was tight, but there were books. When my mother’s girlhood collection ran out, she sent me to my grandfather and his numbered bookshelves. I lived for most of my adolescence on rafts floating down the Mississippi, inside little houses on prairies, and around wood fires in the New England and Chicago and London of my imagination. I was Meg Murry. I was Jo March. I was Scout and Mowgli and Anne Shirley and Lyra Silvertongue and for one glorious summer Sherlock Holmes, with my father playing my indulgent Watson. My country may have thrown off the shackles of imperialism, but I was a volunteer colony of one.

I also felt comfortable at our bookstore-home. Other people might say they "like" it or even "love" it, but in my vocabulary, "comfort- able" was the best scale. To be more specific, I felt connected to the smell of old books. The first time I smelled them, it was as if I'd encountered something I already knew. I would flip open the books and smell them whenever I could, while Granny nagged me, asking what the point of smelling musty books was.

Books took me to places I could never go otherwise. They shared the confessions of people I'd never met and lives I'd never witnessed. The emotions I could never feel, and the events I hadn't experienced could all be found in those volumes.

The Icelanders couldn't get enough of crime stories, Sunna thought. She remembered how she and Valur had got together every Tuesday without fail for six weeks last winter to catch all the episodes of the new British TV series about Inspector Dalgliesh, called Cover Her Face. The whole time it was on, their circle of friends had been obsessed with trying to guess the identity of the murderer. Towards the end of the series, Sunna had remarked to Valur that she could see herself writing a crime story one day. Yeah, right, Valur had said scorn- fully. Like anyone would want to read a detective story set in Iceland.

In the early years of the war, I fell in love, I learned to ride a bike, and I discovered firsthand just how much blood could fit on the inside of a grown man. The world kept turning, and people kept dying, and for the next few years I sat under the leafy green and wrote about the dead.

The entry for the verb salvage in the Oxford English Dictionary offers three primary definitions. The first is "to make salvage of; to save or salve from shipwreck, fire, etc." The second, limited to American and Australian use, is to take or "make use of unemployed or unattended property." The third definition is the most current: "to save and collect (waste material, esp. paper) for recycling."
There is, however, a fourth mean- ing. In 2015 the OED appended what it called a draft definition to the official entry.
Salvage: Philippine English. "To apprehend and execute (a suspected criminal) without trial.

I write her letters every day. I write as though she lived on me other side of the river and a limping postwoman would eliver the post. The postwoman has a lilac beret with a brooch pinned to it, beige woollen tights, and rubber boots splashed with grey spring mud. Heavyset and limping, she walks at first along the riverbank and then steps from the bank onto the water. And she walks and walks until her outline disappears from my sight. I write her letters every day. There are shards of rough amphorae, bits of skin, and everything else that seems to me to be signs of a naïve farewell or forgiveness.

I felt that the experiences I wrote about weren't really mine, and that I had no right to talk or write about them. And I was afraid of disconcerting other people, taking up too much space in their hearts or minds. I wanted to go unnoticed, but writing burst out of me as something that couldn't be concealed. I can't conceal my own self, become invisible. And writing can't stand invisibility.

For half a year I've been writing my story. And everything in it seems unimportant, ragged, substandard. The narrative melts into the running streams of memory. The rhythm is off. Poems and essays have made their way into the book. The book falls to pieces and it appears to be neither elegant nor comprehensible; it in no way resembles the books people are supposed to read and love. It doesn't have any actual constructed characters or complex plotlines.

Three doors away from the Matsushita house lived a firefighter who was extremely colorful, in every sense of the word. He was a young man in his late thirties, a true Edoite, Tokyo born and bred. As was customary for men in his outdoor, dangerous type of work-firemen, roofers, high-altitude construction workers he had a splendid tattoo on his back. The tattoo was a portrayal of Benten Kozo, a tattooed transvestite robber celebrated in Kabuki drama, who had such a beautiful face that he was able to masquerade convincingly as a woman. The fireman himself had a rough, manly, rather squashed- looking face.