Good books, new and vintage

Starting this week, the Cloquet Public Library is offering its Winter Reading Program to encourage people of all ages to read. Librarians have been asking area leaders to recommend five books for their “Leaders are Readers” promotion on Facebook. As a Pine Knot Board member, I am contributing my five choices, and I’m adding in here my husband’s current reading as well!

The books I’m recommending span the genres. Some are vintage and some quite recent. I’m currently reading and loving Michelle Obama’s autobiography, “Becoming” (2018). It’s a lovely account of growing up in a strong and loving family in Chicago’s South Side, winning scholarships, graduating from Princeton and earning a law degree from Harvard. She returned to Chicago to join a prestigious corporate law firm. One day, a new intern was assigned to her — Barack Obama. They fell in love, and Barack opened for her the value and excitement of working in community organizing. She quit her law firm job and began working for nonprofits. She revisits their marriage and how trying it was to be mated to a man who never wanted to say no. To a run for the Illinois Legislature, the U.S. Congress and beyond, especially given their young children. In her role as first lady, Michelle did lots of wonderful work without seeking the limelight the way a Jackie Kennedy or Eleanor Roosevelt did. High school students will find the chapters on her schooling years particularly engaging.

My favorite recent novel is Pulitzer Prize-winning Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light you Cannot See” (2014). It follows the parallel lives of two children, one German and the other French, as their countries sink into World War II. The girl, who lives with her widowed father in Paris, is blind. Her father teaches how to navigate the Parisian streets by listening, smelling familiar bakeries, and touching objects such as curbs, light posts, newspaper stands. The boy, growing up in a small orphanage, finds an old radio, figures out now to fix it, and on it hears news from France about the coming war. He has no choice but to join the German army, but his radio skills keep him from the carnage of the front lines. The two children end up in the same town, the same building in Belgium towards the war’s end.

For poetry, Mary Oliver’s “The Leaf and the Cloud” (2001). Oliver, America’s best-selling poet, lived a lonely childhood in rural Ohio, coping by exploring the fields and woods around her. Her poems spill over with metaphors from the wild animal world. Here are a few lines from this Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning volume:

You still recall, sometimes, the old barn on your great-grandfather’s farm, a place you visited once, and went into, all alone, while the grownups sat and talked in the house.

It was empty, or almost. Wisps of hay covered the floor, and some wasps sang at the windows, and maybe there was a strange fluttering bird high above, disturbed, hoo-ing a little, and staring down from a messy ledge with wild, binocular eyes.

On the spiritual side, I recommend Karen Armstrong’s “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life” (2010). Armstrong, a British scholar of religion, won the 2008 TED Prize and founded the online Charter for Compassion, crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, and Buddhism. The book’s chapters cover topics such as Wish for a Better World, Learn about Compassion, Compassion for Yourself, Empathy, Mindfulness, Concern for Everyone and the always daunting Love your Enemies.

And here’s an “out of the box” choice: Superior Hiking Trail Association’s “Guide to the Superior Hiking Trail,” 8th Edition (2018). This book, and its predecessor editions, have led me through miles and miles of nearby Arrowhead hiking. The trail starts in Jay Cooke State Park and wends its way eastward up the mountainous peaks (Ely, Bardon) and northeast to the Magney-Snively Natural Area and Spirit Mountain. It’s been fascinating hiking high above Duluth’s West End, up under I-35W, onto Enger Tower, down to the waterfront and Rose Garden, Hartley Nature Center, Bagley Nature Area, Hawk Ridge and beyond. Member-supported and volunteer-powered, the nonprofit Superior Hiking Trail Association builds, maintains, and renews the 310-plus-mile trail along the North Shore of Lake Superior.

Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at University of Minnesota. A Pine Knot Board Member, she lives in Red Clover Township north of Cromwell with her husband Rod Walli.