The Garden of the Printed Book: Some Ways to Pass the Time in Viral Lock-up By Happily Turning Pages

So how's the hunkering down, walking outdoors, and virtual interaction lifestyle suiting you? Phone time or Facetime? Zoom in, or simply crash and die? 

         Six feet between us still better than six feet under? 

         I would add to the roster of indoor activities most of us are surviving with by going back to an actually ancient, but viable human-centered technology -- the book. Which is accessed by "reading." And requires the application of human physical and mental senses. 

         And so, based on my own recent downtime experience, a short list of recommended reads. 

         But first, my friend Karl recently wrote me about reading Nathaniel Philbrick's book "Mayflower," a history of the Plymouth Colony from its founding through King Philip's War. A good choice to start with. There are lots of reasons why this book, published some years ago, is worth a read, one of them being this year's celebration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Plymouth. Another, as Karl points out, is the book's treatment of King Philip's War, Colonial America's first 'Indian War,' a neglected subject in American history courses, and a permanent stain on the nation's human rights record.

           The history of the relations between the Europeans who arrived here in the 17th century (and then kept on coming) and the indigenous peoples who had been living here for thousands of years will never, I suspect, cease to be relevant. In my opinion, the history of those relations still calls out for something like the full "Truth and Reconciliation" process carried in South Africa. 

          From history let's move to fiction. The best novels often seem to me to be "history as interpreted by human imagination" -- and repurposed for various needs by the fundamental human gift of storytelling. 

           I've recently enjoyed three such novels.

           "The Strangler Vine," by M.J. Carter, is first rate historical fiction set in India during its rule by the East India Company in the early 19th century. I love novels that give me a sense of what it felt like to 'be there' in some other place at some other time. The was clearly a historian, and has published nonfiction books. Since writing "The Strangler Vine" -- a plant found in the Indian forest that suggests a comparison to the East India Company's hold on India -- she has added two more fictions using the same central characters, one of them "The Infidel Stain," I heard read on discs and found stay-in-the-car-and-listen engrossing. In that book the main characters from "Strangler" are back in England during the period of the Chartist Movement, a time of political upheavals: ghastly crimes, Victorian London, political intrigue, radical politics -- I loved it.

  

         "The Future Home of the Loving God" is the most recent novel by Louise Erdrich, who has written many books dealing with the present and past days of a Native American community in Minnesota. This book fits the current vogue for a dystopian fiction, triggered by -- guess what -- a biological threat completely destabilizing American society. Erdrich is a brilliant character creator, and readers of her other books will note some similarities between the key players here and characters in her previous books. In this book, explaining its title, her pregnant narrator and other Indian characters are obsessed with the Native American Roman Catholic saint Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha -- the name of a church, I recalled, from our days in Plymouth.

          Finally, "Orfeo" is a timely work by another prolific American novelist, Richard Powers. I loved his big recent book about the role trees play in Earth's preservation, "The Overstory."

"Orfeo" is about a musical genius -- Powers' books are always seeped in a thorough knowledge of some field of the arts or sciences -- who is also an amateur chemist who gets in trouble by experimenting in creating genetic changes in -- guess what -- microbes. The book's evocations of various musical works (both famous masterpieces and fictional works created by our spectrum-like hero) are beautifully written. I think I would have appreciated the book on another level if I knew more about, one, music theory or, two, biochemistry. But "Orfeo" is another character-driven thriller (like Erdrich's book), this one  impelled by a post-9/11 -- wow, remember that -- theme of government over-reach in the name of security.

           I don't want to hear anybody say they have nothing to do. Maybe "self-quarantining" is simply the universe's way of saying "drop everything and read a book."