Mrs Blackwell’s September Reading Log

Mr Blackwell and I spent the month of September touring bookshops and other highlights in Michigan, Ohio, Maine and Nova Scotia.

Naturally this meant I spent a lot more time book buying than I did book reading. To add a bit of colour to a slim September reading log I’ve included a little North American bookshop tour for you. Please enjoy.

Flyleaf Bookstore

Technically this visit was on 31 August local time, but I figure that’s the 1st of September at home and it would be such a shame to exclude this beauty:

Flyleaf, Grosse Point Farms, Michigan - I’ve followed this bookstore on Instagram since they first opened and had arranged to record my August Reading Log in their store.

My hair straighteners weren’t working and I’d just flown 17 hours across three flights, but I persisted because this store was even more elegant in real life that it looks in the pictures. Should you ever find yourself in the area, it’s worth a visit - as well as books they serve coffee, pastries and cocktails.

‘The Nine Lives of Kitty K’ by Margaret Mills

This book was a gift from my friend Aimee at Paper Plus, Cromwell. I grew up in Central Otago and she thought I might enjoy a story from the homelands.

Based on a real life woman in the Otago goldfields, this is presented as a work of historic fiction and told in the style of a great yarn.

Kitty’s Irish mother - from a deeply working-class family - falls pregnant to her boyfriend from an esteemed local family. She’s forced into an unsuitable marriage to her boyfriend’s brother and they are shipped off to New Zealand.

The story follows Kitty's life and was an interesting look into the lives of early female immigrants to New Zealand. If you also have ancestors who came to New Zealand through Dunedin, you will likely enjoy this story for that perspective.

Literati Bookstore

The next stop on our bookshop tour was Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan - part of a bustling college town. The store has typewriters that the public can leave messages on and a few years ago they published a book with some of the messages that customers left behind.

‘Cocaine & Rhinestones: A History of George Jones and Tammy Wynette’ by Tyler Mahan Coe

We had a lot of driving to do this month and clocking in at an extraordinary 25 hours, 5 minutes this audiobook covered many of them.

Based on a podcast of the same name, the audiobook is an incredibly detailed look at the history of country music, and eventually, the relationship of George Jones and Tammy Wynette.

I’d previously listened to parts of the podcast so I knew what to expect of Tyler’s narration style. Think of cross between offstage Crusty the Clown, and Rob Fleming in High Fidelity. He has a tone of mild exasperation at having to explain the minutiae of country music to such a group of idiots. And I mean all of that as a compliment, but it’s probably not a style for a general audience. If you want that, go and watch this truely excellent mini-series on Paramount - but fans of country music will love this book and it’s fine level of research and detail.

Arctic Tern Bookstore

Another bookshop I discovered through the power of Instagram, this was my second visit to Allison’s fantastic store in Rockland, Maine. Arctic Tern is the model of a perfect independent bookshop, right-sized for it’s community, with an owner who really cares to put just the right book in your hands. I could have stayed all day - and maybe next time I will!

‘Where the Forest Meets the River’ by Shannon Bowring

Allison at Arctic Tern organised a signed copy of Shannon Bowring’s new book for me. This is the follow up to last year’s Road to Dalton and it returns to the same fictional small town in Maine. I absolutely loved the first book - it was one of my 2023 favourites - and I had perhaps built up too much expectation for the sequel.

Many of the characters were in the original book but their stories just didn’t seem to advance very much, and the story line didn’t have the twists of the first book. Having said this, I’m still eager to read the third instalment which is in the works.

The Barn Swallow Book Shops

Not one, but two Barn Swallow Book Shops in the town of Rockport, Maine. The older store is in a historic barn, on the edge of the business area and opposite the town library. The second store had not long opened and was right in the heart of the township with a particularly interesting selection of travel books including…

‘Water, Wood, and Wild Things’ by Hannah Kirshner

This book details the author’s experience in the Japanese mountain town of Yamanaka. She works and interns alongside master craftsmen in sake, woodturning, paper and charcoal making, as well as foraging for mushrooms and attending a traditional duck hunt (where they hunt with nets).

Her stories were interesting and thoughtful, and she was careful not to over-glamorize what appears to be a hard life for some of these craftspeople trying to make a living in small town Japan.

Lunenburg, Nova Scotia 🇨🇦

Lunenburg, Nova Scotia boasts three independent bookshops in a town of just over 2,000 people. The town is a UNESCO World Heritage site, so much of the historic architecture has been preserved. Founded in 1753, it was one of the first British attempts to settle Protestants in Nova Scotia.

Each of the bookshops had a very unique character and for Margaret Atwood fans, Lunenburg Bound has a pretty extensive collection of signed first editions.

We were in Lunenburg for a unique business conference that included morning coffees on the rocks and cocktails on a tiny island in the Atlantic.

LaHave River Books

LaHave is an artists community outside of Lunenburg. You can drive there but the fastest way to access the town is to take your car on a 10 minute cable ferry ride across the river. The experience is a real novelty, especially because it was such a lovely sunny day when we went.

The LaHave River Bookshop is tucked behind a historic bakery and looks straight out to the river. It was clearly a destination for locals with lots of lively chat happening when we visited.

Letters to a Young Writer, by Colum McCann

This was my fifth and final book for the month - a small collection of short essays on the art of writing fiction. Even though I don’t write fiction I often enjoy books about the craft and this one was beautifully written.

Here’s just two of the many lessons I have marked with Book Darts.

On Language and Plot:

“We often make a mistake by concentrating too much on plot: it is not the be-all and end-all in a piece of literature. Plot matters, of course it matters, but it is always subservient to language. Plot takes a backseat in a good story because what happens is never as interesting as how it happens. An how it happens occurs in the way language captures it and the way our imaginations transfer that language into action.”

And the Habit of Hoping:

“Find your life - beyond your writing life - worth living. Be in the habit of hoping. Allow yourself a little joy, even in the face of the world’s available evidence. In fact, try to create the evidence just about anywhere you can.”

See you again at the end of October for the more usual video round up.