History along the Mississippi

When I was growing up, my father had a membership at Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. I don’t know just how often he took us there, but I always enjoyed it, especially visiting the shops of the blacksmith, the potter, and the pewtersmith. As a child I was probably most interested in the process, seeing how iron or clay or molten pewter could turn into horseshoes, pitchers, or spoons. (And in the case of the potter and pewtersmith, how an imperfect product could easily be collapsed back into the raw material and the process started over.)

As an adult, I’m more interested in seeing how people used to live, and how everyday objects could be made with the limited materials and tools available. When I was looking for a place to go for a day or two, I settled on Nauvoo after discovering that the district known as Old Nauvoo had various shops you could visit and learn about their various trades, as well as being the site of significant events for those with an interest in religious history.

I knew a little of the history of Nauvoo from reading historical fiction, but I remembered few details and had no idea just how accurate those were anyway. I didn’t have a particularly strong interest in learning more about Joseph Smith and the religious organization he founded (commonly called the Mormon church but they refer to it as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), but I had enough curiosity to learn more about it to want to see their free production of “Remembering Joseph” at the Historic Nauvoo Visitors’ Center before beginning to explore Old Nauvoo.

I would guess that the majority of the audience were Latter Day Saints, though I suppose there must be other people like me who go there out of curiosity and for the history. Certainly in the shops in Old Nauvoo and at the Carthage jail the next day, the rest of the people seemed to be family groups, many (most?) of them repeat visitors. Once I was asked by one of the missionaries whether I was a member of the Church, but no one made any effort to engage me in any discussion about my religious views. I thought a couple times of asking, when they spoke of people receiving the “restored Gospel of Jesus Christ,” what was wrong with the one preached before Joseph Smith. But it did not seem to be the time or place to get into that.

I was somewhat disappointed that in most of the shops, nothing was actually being made (as at Old Sturbridge Village, where you could actually buy the products in the gift shop). But you can learn a lot just from seeing examples of products in various stages of completion, with explanations of the work to get from one step to the next. I enjoyed seeing how to make a tin pan, shoes, bricks, a rifle, and wagon wheels. At the print shop I not only saw how a newspaper was produced using movable type but also heard the origin of words and phrases such as upper- and lowercase (from the position of the cases holding these letters) and “minding your p’s and q’s” (which were next to each other in the case and could easily be mixed up since they were mirror images of each other).

At each shop, the missionaries (always two of them, who took turns explaining things) also told about the people who had owned and worked in these businesses, usually including how they had come to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and how they had shown their faith in how they lived, and sometimes in something they had written (such as a letter or diary). Always the portraits they provided of these long-ago Saints were of exemplary faith and behavior. I couldn’t help wondering, did they pick and choose from the stories that could have been told to find only those that showed these people in the best light, or did they only choose to restore buildings that had been the property of the saintliest Saints?

One shop I particularly enjoyed was the Webb Brothers Blacksmith & Wainwright Shop. In the blacksmith side, we were shown how horseshoes were made (though the one he made seemed to be a scaled down model of one, a memento for a tourist to take home rather than a practical shoe that could go on a horse’s hoof). He also explained why not only the horses but also the oxen needed shoes (I had never heard of ox shoes before). But what I found even more interesting was the wainwright side of the shop, where he showed how the large wagon wheels were made, why the rear wheels were larger than the front wheels, and other features of the wagons that were made by the thousands for the planned exodus to the West.

Leaving the wainwright’s shop, I followed the Trail of Hope down to the bank of the Mississippi, reading the signs posted at intervals with words written by people who had left Nauvoo, telling about their experiences of suffering and loss. I may not understand or agree with their religious beliefs, but they certainly showed dedication to and faith in their Church and their leaders as they left nearly everything behind and headed out into unknown dangers.

Reaching the river, I was distracted from serious thoughts about history by seeing a huge area of lilies and lily pads along the river bank. (The next day, driving home on the other side of the river, I saw expanses of lily pads there were if anything even larger.) I’ve seen lily pads before, but in ponds, not rivers, and I’m not sure I had ever seen such big ones as these. I’m curious what makes them proliferate in certain places along the river and not others, but so far I haven’t found anything much about it in my online searches.

My last stop in Old Nauvoo was the Lyon Home and Drug and Variety Store. I remember the General Store at Old Sturbridge Village, so it wasn’t too surprising to see a store that sold baskets, barrels, fabric, dishes, and other household items. But I was somewhat surprised that this was also the drug store. (Though now that I think about it, I remember buying school supplies at the drug store when I was growing up, as well as wishing I had money to buy some decorative items such as a really pretty flower pot that I admired every time I was there.)

I was interested to learn that many of the herbs sold there came from the garden outside, so I wandered out there for a while, but unfortunately none of the plants are labeled. I thought this one might be some kind of pepper (I remembered hearing the missionary mention capsicum), but my iPhone plant identifier guesses either groundcherry or squash.

I don’t think it looks like squash, but I did find gourds elsewhere in the garden. There was a trellis of some kind in the back, and I walked up to it to see what was inside, and was surprised to see a number of large green objects hanging from the top and sides. Looking more closely I realized they were gourds, and I wondered why they were hung there. Then I looked even closer, and realized there were growing there. I don’t know what use they would have in the drug store, but they were pretty cool to look at.

When I had looked for a place to stay the night, the place with the best reviews – within my limited budget – happened to be in Carthage, which is where Joseph Smith died while being held in the Carthage Jail. I hadn’t initially been all that interested in visiting the jail, but after listening to a number of presentations by LDS missionaries in Nauvoo and learning lots of interesting history, I decided to do the tour of the jail the next morning.

After I got home that night, I looked up a bit of history on the conflicts that led up to the murder of Joseph Smith and his brother Hiram. I couldn’t help but notice how the accounts of the missionaries had left out any details of why Smith had been accused of treason or why the mob gathered outside the jail, other than that they hated Smith and wanted to get rid of him and drive out the Latter Day Saints. I wonder if the missionaries are taught a version of history that also leaves out anything that would explain – which does not mean justify – the behavior of those who killed Smith.

The internet is of course full of unreliable information, and even published books are hardly guaranteed to be accurate. But this article puts the matter into some perspective. No doubt fear and prejudice of people with what would have been considered heretical theology (here is a comparison of LDS and traditional Christian views), but political power was also very significant.

We know from far more recent history that justice is sometimes subverted by political power of one kind or another. While it does not excuse the crime of those who broke into the jail and killed the Smith brothers, it helps to explain their motivation, fearing that this man who had such power over a whole city (and aspired to much higher office) would again be able to escape punishment, this time for what was labeled treason (he had declared martial law within the city – and he was commander-in-chief of the city militia, so he could enforce it – setting himself and his followers as a law unto themselves).

Another thing I don’t remember the missionaries mentioning at all was that at the time of his death, Joseph Smith was running for president of the United States. Historians disagree as to whether he was a serious candidate or just doing it to bring attention to certain issues. He made it clear that as president he would make sweeping changes – some of which were made within a couple of decades, and some people credit him with having contributed to those changes by having campaigned for them.

Back to my trip – from Carthage I headed across the river to Keokuk, where I visited the George M. Verity River Museum. I like museums in general, and I was intrigued at the idea of a museum inside a paddleboat. Actually, it’s more that the (now landbound) paddleboat is the museum. I knew next to nothing about how paddle boats operated, and I very much enjoyed the tour, hearing the history of the George M. Verity and seeing how it operated back when it went up and down the river.

My final stop before heading home was also in Keokuk, the Keokuk National Cemetery. I don’t have any relatives buried there (as far as I know, but there are no doubt some people there that I’m distantly related to, if you go back enough generations to a common ancestor), but it is a peaceful place to visit, very different from the other historical sites I had seen on my trip.

Micro-vacations

Like many people, I find it hard to use all the vacation time I have accrued. Traveling is expensive, so we only take a trip every other year. I could take a “staycation” and work on projects around the house, or just relax with some books, but frankly I enjoy my job more than trying to tackle all the work that needs to be done in the basement, and I manage to find time for reading nearly every day.

But I made up my mind that this year I’m going to use more of my vacation time, even if it’s only a day at a time. I can do day trips to state parks or to towns with interesting history, like when I went to Galena a couple of years ago. If I stay overnight I can see a lot more without it being too expensive. So far the one destination I’ve decided on is Nauvoo.

One trip I take a few times a year is to and from my son’s college. Usually I take only a half day off, or even go after work, but yesterday I took the whole day off, and decided to find some places to visit on the way. I did a web search for offbeat places to see, of which there are many in other parts of the state but surprisingly few between here and his college. But I did find two more or less on the way.

I’ve known about the Swinging Bridge in Columbus Junction for years, and driven past the sign for it more times than I can remember, thinking sometime I really should go see it. It’s not something my husband can join me for – someone who walks with a cane (and more often these days, a walker) needs a stable surface to walk on. But since I was alone in the car yesterday, it worked out nicely.

A sign in the parking lot pointed up the road to get to the bridge, or in a different direction to follow a trail to the bridge. I like hiking, so I chose the trail. For a while I wondered whether it was really going to get me to the bridge, since it wound up and down and around, but I finally realized that it was taking me down through the ravine and up to the other end of the bridge.

Once I got on the bridge, at first I didn’t feel the effect of the bridge moving all that much. But once I got to the center of the bridge I had to put away my phone (which I was using to take pictures) and hold both sides to feel more comfortable, until I got far enough across that it again felt more stable underfoot.

One thing that surprised me was seeing dozens of padlocks, of all sizes and styles, hanging from the bridge (mostly in the middle, so they are not visible in this picture). I vaguely remembered having seen that kind of thing before, but I don’t remember now where it was. Or why they were there, until I (again) looked it up online.

My second stop was Snake Alley in Burlington. Again, I have driven past the sign for it many times, and wondered what it was. Once I stood at the bottom and looked up, it was easy to see why it has been called The Crookedest Street in the World. Even with all the switchbacks to make the slope more manageable, it climbs steeply enough that I was starting to breath harder by the time I reached the top.

One thing I wondered about was why the bricks formed such an uneven surface. They look flatter in the photo than they actually are. I wondered if perhaps they had shifted over the years, but it turns out they were laid that way on purpose. They were “laid edge-up and beveled to give better footing for horses.” There are lots of historic buildings, but very few roads around that still look as they did before automobiles transformed our cities.

Another nearby alley is less picturesque, but equally gives a sense of how different roads looked in my great-grandparents’ time. (Not that any of my relatives lived in Iowa, that I know of, but I assume roads were like this in many places.)

I picked the Swinging Bridge and Snake Alley because they were convenient to stop at along the way, but it occurred to me afterward that they represent two different very different ways of facilitating travel on difficult terrain. The swinging bridge was constructed as a the shortest way to cross from one side of the ravine to the other, rather than having to follow a long winding trail down and then back up the other side. Snake Alley was deliberately made much longer and winding than a more direct but much steeper route straight up and down the slope. Neither is used today for ordinary travel, only by those, like me, who enjoy seeing a bit of history and walking somewhere for no reason than to get away from the ordinary and everyday forms of travel.

Books I read in January 2022

With the start of a new year is the start of a new PopSugar Reading Challenge. This year’s challenge seems to be mostly categories that I have to intentionally look for books that fit, rather than just reading books and figuring out which categories they fit in. But some of the categories have been pretty easy.

I hadn’t really paid much attention to the movie previews when we went to see Dune in October (these days the previews seem to be mostly lots of fast movement and noise, which I do not find at all appealing, so I read until the previews are over), but I do remember one was based on one of Agatha Christie’s mysteries. A goodreads.com discussion of the prompt “a book becoming a TV series or movie in 2022” mentioned Death on the Nile, which apparently has had its release date changed several times, but is finally coming out in February 11.

I recently started listening to audiobooks on my smartphone, and I started with fairly short books that I was sure I could finish by the time they needed to be “returned” to the library. Death on the Nile easily fit that requirement, at only about eight hours. Like other Agatha Christie mysteries I have read, it was moderately interesting but not enough to make me eager to read more by her anytime soon. My biggest annoyance with this audiobook was the volume – either I had to keep it turned up high enough that sometimes I found it unpleasantly loud, or I would find that in other places it was hard to make out all of what was being said, especially by Poirot.

One of the books I had in my pile of books to read (a literal pile in this case, meaning I have already decided to read them in the relatively near future, though “relatively” is very flexible) was The Pastor by Eugene Peterson. It was a gift to my husband from someone at one of the churches he used to pastor, and as a pastor’s wife I thought it would be very interesting. Since I had read his book Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ last year, The Pastor would work well for “a different book by an author you read in 2021.”

Peterson has a way with words, he knows Scripture and theology well, and he clearly has the heart of a pastor. I had always thought of him primarily as a writer, however, until reading this book. I found his story fascinating, but the emphasis was never on his experiences, but how God shaped him for and in his vocation as pastor. And he writes not only of what it means to be a pastor, but to be followers of Christ, especially a community of followers of Christ. He criticizes the tendency of modern American churches to be too caught up in the consumerist mindset that afflicts America as a whole, too eager to work on what they can accomplish rather than what God is trying to do in and among them. But the focus is never on what’s wrong with them, but rather the need to relinquish that mindset and choose a better way of being the church.

Shortly after I started Peterson’s book, I was in the library to return books and noticed, in the New Books section, a book by Marie Benedict. Having just read The Only Woman in the Room in December, I decided to read Her Hidden Genius without even bothering to find out who it was about. If I hadn’t been reading the book by Peterson, this could of course have fit the prompt of another book by an author I had read last year. But this book turned out to be so new that it worked for “a book published in 2022” (the New Books section often has books that have been on those shelves for months, but I may have been the first to check out this one).

And it was a good choice. I liked it even better than the previous book. I found Rosalind Franklin a more engaging person, even if she lacked social skills. (I could identify with her in that, though over the years I’ve gotten better at it.) I was fascinated by her scientific work, but I also liked her enjoyment of mountain climbing. (I’ve always liked hiking but never done any serious climbing.) I was of course indignant at the way some of the male scientists treated her, with Watson and Crick taking all the credit for the discovery of the helical shape of DNA. I was disappointed to see her disregard for safety measures regarding exposure to radiation, but of course there was much less awareness of the danger then. And it was sad to see her dying of cancer – even knowing it was coming I felt a little choked up at the end.

Since I hadn’t heard of Rosalind Franklin before, it was surprising to find her mentioned on page 2 of the next book I read. (Of course, it’s possible I’d seen Rosalind Franklin mentioned before but the name meant nothing to me. Once you learn about something you start noticing it.) Someone on goodreads.com had suggested What stars are made of by Sarah Elisabeth Allen for “a book with a constellation on the cover or in the title,” and once I read a few readers’ impressions of the book I wanted to read it too.

It’s about a 7th grader named Libby who has Turner Syndrome, loves science and isn’t good at making friends, and comes up with an audacious plan to win a contest and use the money to help her family. But that synopsis doesn’t really tell what’s so great about the book. Libby is funny, she is brave, and she is very persistent. I didn’t care for the deals she tries to make with the Universe, but I suppose that’s how some 7th graders – and some adults – see life. It’s a book that is full of hope, not because the Universe will make things turn out the way we want, or because if we try hard enough we can achieve anything, but because there is a lot that is good in life and in people, and in spite of the disappointments and obstacles, there is a lot to be joyful about.

Allen’s book was written for young readers and was easy to finish in a single weekend, but the next book I finished had taken me over two weeks to get through. One of the prompts for the reading challenge is “an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner.” I hadn’t heard of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award previously, but I learned that this award, established in 1935, is to “recognize books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity.” I found several of these books that sounded interesting and went on my list of books to read. If I find a book that matches more than one category, I only “count” it for one category so that I read a different book for each prompt, but finding a book that could count for more than one is one way I prioritize books to read.

A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki was an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner in 1994, but it also caught my attention because it fits the prompt “a book with a reflected image on the cover or ‘mirror’ in the title.” I found it interesting on the whole, though a lot of the history it covered was more or less familiar to me. It focuses on certain ethnic minorities, especially blacks, native Americans, and Mexicans. It also includes Japanese and Chinese, Irish, and Russian Jews. There are others mentioned but I don’t remember others that got entire chapters. There was not a lot that was new in the chapters on the blacks, in large part because of books I’ve read over the past two years. I knew somewhat less of the other groups’ history, but the only group that I had never read much about was the Russian Jews who came to America. With all of them, I appreciated the quotes from letters, newspapers, etc. but felt that there were often too many of them. One or two make the point and give the sense of what people thought and felt, but reading several on the same topic did not really teach me more about it. My other disappointment about it was that each group was dealt with as a separate group, up into the mid-twentieth century and the discussion of how WWII brought everyone together to fight a common enemy. I had expected to learn how each cultural group influenced and enriched the whole, but the book mostly focuses on suffering and oppression of each group. It’s important history to know, but I had expected the book to also go beyond that.

One book I really enjoyed reading that I didn’t initially think fit any prompts in the reading challenge was Learning to Pray: A Guide for Everyone by James Martin. I didn’t recognize the author’s name when I put it on hold from the library, but once I was reading it I thought it seemed familiar, and when I checked my reading list from last year I realized that Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life, which I read in September, was also by James Martin. So that’s a third book that fits “a different book by an author you read in 2021.”

This was also an excellent book, perhaps even better than the one on humor. I can’t say there was a lot that was new to me in terms of ideas or methods regarding prayer, but I found it very helpful in terms of encouraging me to expand my prayer life rather than making me feel I had been deficient and needed to improve. I don’t know if it’s me (and my perfectionist tendencies) or the things I have read on prayer, but I usually find myself feeling that I haven’t been praying very well, whether it’s a matter of what I pray for or how often or how confidently or something else. One thing that I was somewhat familiar with, but hadn’t really thought of as prayer, is Ignatian contemplation, imagining yourself in a scene in Scripture and seeing how it connects with you in a way that may not happen simply from reading it. Martin also talks about how we may realize something important from emotions, memories, and desires that we become aware of during prayer. We often think of prayer as asking for things, whether for ourselves or others, and most of this book is about just getting to know God better. (I would have liked it if he had talked a little more about the asking part, though.)

Since I have been rereading the Narnia books, I guess these also count as “a different book by an author you read in 2021.” In January, that was Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and The Horse and His Boy. I enjoyed them all, though as usual there are parts of Voyage of the Dawn Treader that I find a little boring (my favorite part is when Eustace is un-dragoned). The Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy are good adventure stories, but the fact that I know what is going to happen makes them less exciting than they were when I was young. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Magician’s Nephew, which I know just as well, did not give me that same sense of letdown – I think they depend less on the adventure aspect of the story to make them satisfying.

That leaves only one book I read in January that did not fit any of the reading challenge prompts – and wasn’t one that I liked well enough to want to read another book by the same author. I picked it primarily because it was short, and I just wanted an audiobook to listen to when driving to pick up my son from college, and then after dropping him off again. An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good by Helene Tursten, which is a series of connected short stories rather than a novel, was only around three hours so that worked well. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to read about an old woman who kills people and gets away with it, but it surprised me by being moderately entertaining. As one reader review pointed out, “It’s not really funny as some reviews promise but it’s hard not to like Maud because she is only getting rid of people who need to be gotten rid of.” Well, I can’t say they need to be gotten rid of, but Maud’s victims don’t generate much sympathy with the reader either.

Peopling a Bible-times diorama

Last year I started a new hobby, making dioramas. My first project was from the world of fantasy. There being no objective standards as to how a dragon’s cave should look, I was free to choose a shape and size that suited me. If the sword and the crown among the jewels in the dragon’s hoard appear to have come from vastly different-sized men, who is to say one did not come from some race of giants?

But next I decided to attempt a first-century Jewish house, such as might have been found in Bethlehem or Bethany. I had once thought about making a model of such a house as a visual aid for Sunday School or Bible studies, to show what it might have looked like for the men taking their paralytic friend up on the roof, what the upper room make have been like, and where the animals may have been kept (and where a manger might have been repurposed by a young woman who needed a place to lay her newborn son). At the time I felt such a project was beyond me, but now I have decided to tackle it.

There is no lack of information on the internet about what such houses might have looked like, including drawings of them. From a simple “four-room” house to much larger structures with interior courtyards, I had so many to pick from I spent months just trying to decide on a model. Finally I found one page which describes using the findings of archeology to construct more historically accurate nativity scenes. (As it is in Spanish, you may not be able to appreciate much besides the pictures. But it reminded me that part of my initial interest in dioramas grew from my fascination with the elaborate nativity scenes I saw in Spain, generally modeled more on typical Spanish village scenes that those of first-century Israel.)

I’m not sure yet how to construct the walls or roof, but more challenging was how to provide realistic figurines to make the house an image of family life, not just some ancient architecture. There are lots and lots of figurines in a variety of sizes for dioramas of various scales. But it seems that most people re-creating scenes in miniature are either doing military scenes (of wars from throughout history) or model trains (meaning they depict scenes from the last two hundred years). So most of the figurines of ancient peoples are fighters, and most of the people from everyday life are relatively modern.

At one point I thought the best I could manage was some native American figures, as I found a kit including women grinding meal and weaving cloth, probably not so different from ancient Israelite women except for style of clothing (and as the figurines are unpainted plastic, I might be able to hide the differences with paint). Then my husband found a kit labeled “The Folk of Judea 1 B.C. – 1 A.D.” How much more accurate could I ask for? (Unfortunately there is no one grinding meal or weaving cloth, however.) And I also finally found a set of the farm animals I had been looking for (but which always seemed to be out of stock when I tried to order).

I haven’t tackled the human figures yet, but I’ve been enjoying working on the animals. They are all 1/72 scale, meaning a 6-foot-tall person is one inch high. It’s difficult to get the tiny details – but that also means the details are small enough that it won’t be obvious where I couldn’t get things just right.

Empty pedestals

I came across an article on HistoryNet.com while looking for different points of view on the current controversy over monument removal. The first two words of the title particularly caught my attention: “Empty Pedestals: What should be done with civic monuments to the Confederacy and its leaders?” A number of historians provide different perspectives and suggestions on how to approach the issue.

Some advocate removing the monuments, some advocate moving them to museums or battlefields with appropriate context added to educate visitors on the history involved, some advocate leaving them in place but adding new sculptures representing who and what we value today, and one suggests giving people the opportunity to destroy the monument and then leave its fragments in place as a different kind of monument.

What I haven’t seen – though no doubt some people out there have suggested it – is that the monuments be removed but the pedestals remain. To me that seems to provide a strong visual image that there is history behind these objects, but that it is a a complex history that requires learning why the pedestals were there to begin with and then why the monuments that once stood there are now gone. It would neither erase history (the statues themselves could be kept in some museum dedicated to the whole topic of monument removal and its historical context, and photographs could be displayed on the monuments with an explanation of their history) nor promote a particular viewpoint about it. It would serve as a stark reminder that there had been a monument once thought worthy of celebration and later repudiated as unworthy of society’s esteem.

Personally I have never paid much attention to the monuments in the cities and towns where I have lived. Since I did not pay much attention to them, I couldn’t say if any were of figures currently seen as controversial, but I don’t remember any that were big names in history outside of the local area. They served primarily as landmarks (“turn right at the statue of the guy on the horse”), and a general reminder that there was a history that stretched back to earlier centuries. So my views of course reflect that disinterest, and I cannot claim to understand, at a gut level, the strong emotional reaction of those who have lived in the shadow of monuments that to them represent cruelty and oppression.

Monuments are symbols. That is why they were erected, to hold up as an example of what is valued by the people who put it there. And that is why people feel so strongly that they must be removed, as a symbol of the commitment to the much more difficult project of changing policies and attitudes. And in my mind, empty pedestals would be a fitting symbol of changed social values, and a monument to those who work to change society.

They would also be a reminder that what we value today may be repudiated by our descendants, and a reason to work to educate our children and grandchildren on where we came from, why we hold divergent views, and where we want to move to as a society.

Books: Levittown

As I have nearly finished the 2017 Reading Challenge (I still have to decide on a book with more than 800 pages, and find one from a genre/subgenre I’ve never heard of), I decided to add a few of my own ideas. The first was to read a book that was set in a town/city where I have lived.

I wasn’t sure just what I’d be able to find, at least for the towns I’ve lived in this country. (I know I’d have no trouble finding books set in Valencia or Madrid, the two cities in Spain where I lived while getting my B.A. and M.A. in Spanish.) But in addition to several books about the pearl button industry in Muscatine, Iowa and a murder mystery set in Houghton Lake, Michigan, I found Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb.

Books: The Last Templar

I haven’t been writing posts lately about most of the popular fiction I read. I read mostly for enjoyment, and in the case of the audiobooks, to occupy my mind while driving. There’s not a lot to say, really, about a book like The Last Templar in terms of plot or characterization. It’s interesting, and I enjoyed the historical aspects of the book (while being grateful that it wasn’t as graphic about the tortures inflicted on the Templar leader, Jacques de Molay, as one of the books I read a year or two ago) as well as the mystery and adventure of the present-day story.

But it is the thematic aspects of the book that I reacted strongly to. At the center of the action is the quest to find (or prevent from being found, depending on which side a character is on) a valuable object hidden by the Templars before the destruction of their order. (Note: the rest of this post discusses the object and its significance, which aren’t revealed until the latter part of the novel, so don’t continue reading if you don’t want to know what it is.)

Books: The Wednesday Wars

One thing I like about reading challenges is that I read – and enjoy – books I would not have picked up otherwise. I generally read widely enough that I can check off most of the items on the list without going looking for them. Often I discover that a book I picked for one category fits another, one that would have been harder to find a match for. For instance, I picked Amor Towles’ excellent novel A Gentleman in Moscow because it was a bestseller in 2016, but discovered that it was set in a hotel (and it’s amazing how a book about a man living in a hotel manages to seem so much bigger than its setting).

By now I’m down to the categories that I don’t fill just by accident. I had already read a book with one of the seasons in the title (An Event in Autumn by Henning Mankell, who is one of my current favorite mystery writers, along with Louise Penny, who wrote Still Life, which is set around a holiday other than Christmas), but browsing in the library hadn’t uncovered any books with a month or day of the week in the title.

With Google, however, it was easy to discover The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt, and a quick look at reviews on amazon.com convinced me it was worth reading. Some coming-of-age novels annoy me (I realize that by definition, the main character is at least somewhat immature to start with, but sometimes the characters are just plain hard to care about, let alone like), but this one is wonderful.

Books: Hidden Figures

I don’t remember a lot of details of watching the first moon landing, in July 1969. Mostly I remember being bored with how long it took before they finally opened the door of the lunar module. I don’t actually know if my memories of scenes from Mission Control are from that night, or from movies I’ve seen since then. But my impression of Mission Control is of a bunch of men sitting at banks of computers.

White men, in white shirts, figuring out whatever needed to be figured out to get three men to the moon and back. It never occurred to me, until reading Hidden Figures recently, that a lot of the work behind the scenes had been done by black women.

Books: A Thread of Grace

Having read Mary Doria Russell’s previous books, The Sparrow and Children of God, I was glad to find another book by her on the library shelves. (Though I have to admit I did not check it out the first time I saw it – I knew from her other books that it would be very well-written but also suspected it would be emotionally pummeling at times.)

It is quite a change from the science fiction of the other books, though unlike most science fiction those have as much philosophy as science, and reflect Russell’s background as an anthropologist (she creates entire civilizations to populate a faraway planet). I enjoy historical fiction, and this novel explores an aspect of World War II that I have read little about if at all previously.