I’m happy to recommend five books to my blog readers who still read paper books – there are quite a few, young and old.

The first one I want to mention is a new book by Susan Orleans, “On Animals.”

Over a century ago, the author Henry Beston wrote perhaps the most important thing I’ve ever read about animals:

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals.” Beston was to learn a lesson I have learned repeatedly: everybody agrees that animals are very different from us, but deep down, most animal lovers I know don’t believe it.

The emotionalizing of dogs and cats has become a catastrophe for people and animals. Health care for pets has become an expensive and exploitative scandal. It costs about $200 to walk into a vet’s office in 2022, and illnesses and treatments go quickly into the thousands of dollars.

People equate love with the amount of money they spend, and dogs and cats suffer significantly for it.

More than a half million dogs are not on anti-depressants because their humans believe they are neurotic and screwed up as they are and can’t ever be left alone. Meet a dog with separation anxiety, and the odds are you are likely to meet a  human being with the same problem.

Increasingly, people call their dogs furbabies and consider them their closest friends. It is widely believed that they share our emotions, mostly because they want us to.

We insist that animals are more and more like us when the truth is precisely the opposite.

Anyone who tells me what their dog or cat thinks does not know what they are talking about.

Animals do not in any way see or think or believe as we do; they have their eyesight, hearing, sense of the world, and language. They view the world in a completely different way do not think the way we think. Lucky them.

The tide may be turning. Maria is reading an excellent book about animals called “This Immense World” by Ed Yong. He details just how alien animals are from us. I mentioned this book a couple of weeks ago. If you love animals, take a look.

Susan Orlean’s thoughtful book is well wort.h reading.

“Now and again,” she writes,” I have been asked – and have asked myself – the obvious question: Why animals? There’s no simple answer. I’m curious about animals. They amuse me. They keep me company. They’re nice to look at. Some of them provide me with breakfast food. I think I have the same response to animals that I would if Martians landed on earth: I would like to get to know and befriend them, all the while knowing we were not quite of the same ilk. They seem to have nothing in common with us, yet they’re alien, unknowable, familiar but mysterious.”

This was very much what Henry Beston and the people who know animals the best have been trying to tell us for years. It’s what I have believed for years. I have quoted Beston in every dog book I’ve ever written. I have yet to meet more than a few dog people who believe it, even though, if asked, animal lovers will agree with it instantly.

If you love animals, I’d strongly recommend this book. It is wise, funny, and touching all at the same time. Her anecdotes about animals are priceless.

__

 

I’m reading “Haven, ” a new novel by Emma Donahue, the very gifted Irish writer living in Canada.

The storyline is gripping.

In the seventh century, three men set out from a troubled monastery, vowing to leave the world behind and devote their lives to worship and faith. They head for an extraordinary and remote island their leader has seen only in a dream with nothing but his dream to guide them.

If I had one phrase to describe Donahue, it would be psychological intensity and incredible precision of language.

I’m hooked on this book one-third through it. So far, so great.

_____

 

“Watchers Of Time,” By Charles Todd, an Inspector Rutledge Mystery,

I’ve finished the latest mystery from one of my favorite British mystery writers, Charles Todd, whose hero is Inspector Ian Rutledge, just back from World War I, alone and lonely, recovering from many horrors and wounds, and struggling to fit in at Scotland Yard, and his exhausted and battered country.

He has dreadful dreams, and the love of his life dumped him as soon as he got back from the war.

As always, he is challenged and doubted every step of the way, but he is almost always right, even at great sacrifice.

He carries a dead British Soldier and friend named Hamish in his head; they secretly talk and fight all the time – Rutledge was responsible for his death. Inspector Rutledge is, along with Vera Stanhope, one of the most exciting and complicated detectives in the deep British mystery stable of troubled heroes.

Nothing about him is simple.

For my money, this is the most intelligent of the British mysteries and one of the most satisfying and engaging. I highly recommend it.

_____

 

“Diary Of A Misfit:” A Memoir And A Mystery, Non-Fiction

I’ve not yet read this book, but I will soon. It is pulling at me.

When Casey Parks became a lesbian in college in 2002, she and everyone else figured her life in the Deep South was over. Her mother shunned her, and her pastor asked God to kill her. Park’s grandmother, a staunch conservative who grew up picking cotton,  asked to speak with her privately and told her that she had grown up with a kind and loving  neighbor “across the street from a woman who lived as a man.”

This woman was very kind to her, she confines,  begging Casey to find out what had happened to her.

Park undertook a journey across the country to find out what happened and also to deal with her mother, who she loves dearly but who is struggling to accept her.

This is a compelling story from a young journalist who can write very vividly and recounts chasing ghosts all over the country, hers and others.  She is determined about what happened to this woman who lived as a man.

I got the book for Maria, who just finished it and said it was beautiful. She has delicious taste in books.

 

____________

 

“The Cold Millions,” A Novel by Jess Walter

Jess Walter is perhaps the best storyteller I can ever remember reading.

I’m almost done with this book, and it’s beautifully written, as all of Walter’s books are.

The story follows the lives of the three Dolan brothers as they set out to make their way West to the then booming mining towns of the Pacific Northwest in the middle of the fierce class warfare raging between the police and wealthy mine owners and the surging labor movement.

It’s an intense and genuine struggle, now forgotten on the murky American holiday of Labor Day. The mines hired thousands of thugs to intimidate, beat, and even kill the labor activists, organizers, and anyone who supported them.

Labor Day was created partly to honor the many labor activists who gave their lives to fight the miners and their cruel, often fatal work. At the time, it was almost a doomed battle for the activists, and many lost their lives trying to organize workers to fight for better wages and safer working conditions.

The book follows the struggles, romantic and otherwise that the brothers face. And there are a lot of those.

The book asks, “is it enough to win the occasional battle, even if you can’t possibly win the war?” It touches home in 2022; many workers are still underpaid and overworked, and more and more are unable to buy decent homes to live with their families. The labor movement has been severely damaged by new laws restricting their organizing.

It seems it’s just an offshoot of capitalism unleashed, the same story, then and now. But Walters tells it wonderfully.

It’s a great yarn, funny and honest, and vivid. Walter knows how to tell an incredible story, and this is one of those.