CALIFORNIA (Reading)

Say the word "summer" and what to comes to mind? For me, a jumble of California memories. Wendy and I were born and bred in the Golden State and spent most of our lives there before coming to the Midwest fifteen years ago. Fittingly enough in the week following the solstice, our Summer Reading is California-centric. Books & Culture contributing editor Preston Jones, of John Brown University, takes as his point of departure Kevin Starr's Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963, just published by Oxford University Press, the latest volume in Starr's monumental history of the state. Touching on earlier installments in the series as well as other representative books, Jones shows how California reveals the dreams and follies of the nation, writ large. (Coming soon under the Summer Reading heading: naturalist Bernd Heinrich's Summer World: A Season of Bounty and Rick Bass' The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana. Plus children's books and much more.)

In articles from the May/June issue of Books & Culture, we have a pair of pieces that play off each other: Steven Ealy on James Fenimore Cooper, "The Founder of American Literature," and Richard Etulain on Wallace Stegner, "Wise Man of the American West." For starters, it's interesting to think about "frontier" and "wilderness" and "the land" in Cooper and in Stegner, the arc from the Early Republic to America at the end of the 20th century. (And since 2009 is Stegner's centenary, why not celebrate it by reading one of his books? Comments from readers about their Stegner favorites will be welcome.)

Last week, Wendy and I had dinner at the home of our friends Gary and Kathy Gnidovic and then watched a DVD of a splendid documentary, James Castle: Portrait of an Artist. I'm leery of the rhetoric surrounding a lot of artists outside the conventional art world—not because I am unresponsive to such work (much of it, like much of anything, isn't my cup of tea; some of it is intermittently interesting; some of it, like the work of James Castle, is wonderfully rich and strange), but because so much emphasis is placed on "the life" as a script of sorts that seeks to dictate our response. (Castle was born deaf and lived with his large extended family in Idaho. He didn't have formal training as an artist but he was a tireless maker of art, strong-willed and intensely purposeful.) Precisely because I love Castle's uncanny drawings made with soot and spit, his collages and constructions, I was hesitant to watch the documentary. Now I'm very glad I did. Yale University Press has published a handsome volume, James Castle: A Retrospective, loaded with examples of his work; also included are several essays and a very perceptive interview with painter Terry Winters. A DVD of the documentary comes with the book. If you haven't seen any of Castle's stuff, check out the book or the DVD or both. You may not be drawn into Castle's world, but if you are, there's a lot to explore.

I know that there is plenty of dysfunction in our health-care system, but I'm reminded now and then of how often we receive excellent care, perhaps taking it for granted. On the weekend I had to go to the Convenient Care Center in Wheaton (one of several in the area operated by Central DuPage Hospital). I want to thank the physician who saw me, Dr. Katie Rosenfeld, and the nurses and technicians who helped. Everyone was friendly, efficient, and thoughtful: a winsome combination.

On another front: The Sky Is Falling, chapter 53. A few days ago, the Chicago Tribune arrived with a wrap that emphasized the paper's commitment to investigative reporting. That was good news, of course, and not mere puffery. But these days we've learned to read between the lines. Whenever a newspaper or magazine issues a stirring affirmation of classic journalistic values, you know more cutbacks are imminent. Saturday's Trib came with the already shrunken Books section reduced to two pages. Half of the opening page was taken up by an uninspiring illustration. There were two short reviews on the bottom half of the page, and bio lines for the reviewers were omitted. On the flip side, half of the top half of the page was taken up with a list of best sellers; and next to that, mini-reviews of three Young Adult books (here the bio line of the reviewer was included). The bottom half of the page was given to a list of "Literary Events." That was it. Then came the Sunday magazine, with a note to readers explaining that beginning in July, the magazine "will be published as a series of special editions throughout the year and not as a weekly section." And on the same day, the New York Times arrived with a shrunken magazine, as previously announced.

Speaking of the Times, this week's Book Review adds a new chapter to the never-ending demonstration that Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction. This comes courtesy of two reviews: Katie Roiphe's review of Cristina Nehring's A Vindication of Love ("love" here has a different sense than you might suppose) and Toni Bentley's review of Richard Bernstein's The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters. I'd like to quote at length—only by great effort am I restraining myself—but if you are interested, and especially if you have a taste for wickedly absurd inadvertent comedy, you can read these complementary pieces yourself, so I'll stick to this one bit, from Roiphe: "If there is anything unsatisfying about this fierce and lively book, it is a slight evasiveness at its core. Nehring does not quite take on the vast continent of quietly married people who must be her target. She attacks the blandness of our current forms of love without directly describing or explaining that blandness."