I was chatting with the owner of a new bookstore (So much hope slipped between the pages of THAT retail choice!) who told me that she reads anything put in front of her nose.

It's the Little Bookstore, btw, and if you are in her part of the world, go buy a book from this young business owner. Oh hell, suit up and go buy a book from any independent bookstore. Yes, a real book. From a real businessperson.

Yay you!

Since it's a summer unlike other summers (unlike ALL other summers, we can only hope) I decided to go a different way.

Instead of reading whatever finds its way to the front of my face, I thought, perhaps make a discipline of it.  

​Ah, that delicious question: what to read?  

John Newbery was a British bookseller who turned children's literature to profit (he published The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes in 1765.
Not the Adam Ant version).

The American Library Association uses his name (John Newbery,  not Adam Ant) to recognize the most "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children."

​Each year since the 1920's, a book wins the Newbery Medal. And often there are a couple of runners-up ––  Newbery Honor books.

Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, whatever, chosen by a group of American librarians.

Doing the easy math, it's 100 of the best books for younger readers from the past 100 or so years.

​I already know a good quarter-century of those book covers from my childhood, but the more recent ones are unexplored territory.

Sidebar: I'm sure it's still going, but reading competitions in grade school ––!

As I remember, any book gave you 1 point, a book with the shiny silver Newbery Honor sticker 2 points, the gold Newbery Medal 3.

Not that it supplied any street cred, but man, I was really good at that game. How I looked forward to those weeks.  

Sigh.

I've knocked out a couple of dozen new titles in the past couple of months, and revisited a double-handful of childhood favorites.

I'm formulating a few theories about the trend of Newbery winners.

The earliest winners tended to focus on "exotic" settings, then came a rash of Revolutionary War stories, and a run on historical fiction.

Unexpectedly, many of the older Newbery seem to me to hold their value --  Gay-Neck, the unfortunately titled 1925 winner about a pigeon in India, still speaks to surviving war, while 1973's The Slave Dancer was frankly amazing: a brutal and intimate depiction of the African slave trade from an unexpected viewpoint.

File under: stuff you find while looking for something else.  

It's a thing that happens with readers: perhaps we gobble up a couple of dozen books a year (wink wink).

In six years, that's a gross. Fast forward ten or twenty years, and frankly, who knows how many books.  Some books remain vivid, but the majority tend to –– fade. 

Highlights linger like the memory of a dream, fragmented but compelling. Perhaps a title or something about the situation or characters, or the appearance of the book itself will persist. 

And while some people can simply let it go...others will be haunted.

So if you have a vague recollection of a book about a thing, set in that place? The one you picked up at the Strand bookstore or the long-lost White Horse Books?

You can probably find it if you want to spend a bit of time. 

And if not, man are there some great books out there waiting to be read.  Hit me up for a recommendation if you like.

​Stay safe, friends.

Do I even need say that my favorite skipper and I are shut in these days? And that I am not complaining?

So far, so good: despite a near-miss on that cancelled trip to Italy, a nearer-miss on the replacement trip to Manhattan, and even though the head-cold plus a random hot flash FEELS like the onset of Covid-19, we are staying healthy.

Knock wood.

I am grateful that we aren't worried about how to feed our family this week. I'm grateful for a nice window to look out. I'm grateful for the sewing skills imbued in me by my sweet mother-in-law. I'm grateful for the internet. 

​From disappointing my running buddy, I quickly went on to wreck my eyesight (Or maybe not, nearly everyone in my extended family was nearsighted.) from hunching over a book in poor light. And boy, did the books help my high school social rep --!

Bibliophile. Bibliophage. Dear Reader. Freaky four-eyes book-worm.  Whatevs.

​Before my eighteenth birthday I got myself set for a four-year reading sabbatical that shaped the rest of my days.

Fredrik Sjö​berg is an entomologist. He's aware how quirky a profession that is. And his particular passion –– hoverflies –– is not especially showy or accessible to the general public.

"Of course I could name a number of very good, very sensible reasons why a person ought to collect flies, but I am not a missionary."

Indeed he is not -- ostensibly -- trying to get his readers interested in hoverflies, fascinating as they may be. In this memoir, he's writing instead about larger questions of obsession and nature (or the outdoors anyway, as he thinks people's passion for "unspoiled" wilderness is a load of hooey).

He's clever and funny, with an original turn to his thinking that startles and charms. (He points out in passing that the only place an entomologist specializing in forensic work on cadavers might have enough work to make a living would be the United States.)
​

At the risk of insulting our collective historical memory, let me review the Blitz.  

In around 1939, the Nazis were marching pretty handily across Europe, invading Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, the Channel Islands, toppling governments and sending whole populations of people to work camps.

Basically setting the platinum standard for European evil.

The British kept fighting (on the beaches, on the landing fields, etc., etc...) and in the late summer of 1940, Hitler sent a bomber to  London.  

It might be that the pilots got a bit turned around and only accidentally dropped a cartload of bombs on London's East End. It might be that the Germans were retaliating for a British raid that killed German non-combatants.  

In any case, the German bombs landed in the heart of the city, destroying houses and killing civilians.  Churchill responded by sending a fleet of bombers to hit Berlin. The British succeeded, and then did it a second and third time –– to the disbelief of the Germans, who thought nobody could get to Berlin.  

Naturally, the Germans were outraged. Hitler vowed that if the British wanted to drop bombs on German cities, well by gum, the Germans would drop ten times as many on British cities.

So then began the Blitz –– the German bombers targeted civilian sites, landmarks, population centers, night after night. Tens of thousands of civilians died. Hundreds of thousands were hurt.  

​The bombardment went on without much stop until the following May, when thankfully, Hitler was distracted by the sparkly-sparkly toy that was Russia.

The Blitz was meant to terrorize the British, but instead of losing heart, the Brits dug in their heels. They sent their kids to the countryside, hunkered down in Tube stations,  and continued to do business in a bombed-out city.

​It was "Britain's finest hour," not the least because with the Germans focused on civilian targets, the Royal Air Force caught a break to rebuild their fleet.

Talk about stiff upper lip. 

In Sarah Waters' The Night Watch, the Blitz is the catalyst for the heartbreaking love affair at center stage.

The novel begins in a grey and tired 1948 and runs backward, tracing the fates of four Londoners to the flash-lit beginning in 1941.

Amazing period detail, wrenching emotion, and astonishing characterization makes me wish I'd written this novel.


From Connie Willis, a pair of double-decker novels called Blackout and All Clear are set in the Blitz and focuses on how ordinary people survived it.

In Blackout, historians from Oxford in 2060 travel back in time to observe the Blitz firsthand. As one might expect, their expedition into the past goes awry and they are unable to return home.

All Clear continues the story to its suspenseful conclusion. It's not for everyone, this cement block's worth of story, but it's among my favorites. It juggles multiple storylines with humor, pathos, and a dollop of historical facts for a long immersive experience.  
​

Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave turns out to be an examination of the variations of bravery –– from the courage of battle, to the strength to simply keep carrying on –– shown by a handful of Londoners.

Based loosely on the story of the author's own grandparents, the novel is engaging and bittersweet.  I gobbled it up over a weekend.

As I wandered around the inter webs, evidence pointed to Joeseph marrying her twice, once in 1872, and then again in 1897.

Or anyway, there was a second "Newton" bride for him.  It might be trendy to renew one's vows now (Or is it? Renewing vows seems an indicator of heavy marital weather.), but it was not a thing I've heard about in the 1890's. 

A bit more clicketty clicking, and sure enough, Joe marries a Newton gal from Dimock in 1897, but that would be Rosella Newton –– Cornelia Jane's younger sister.