The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY

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bookpaths, Charles Dickens at 200 Exhibition, literary travel, New York

Charles Dickens at 200
September 23, 2011 through February 12, 2012

This sounds like a great exhibition.

The Morgan Library & Museum’s collection of Dickens manuscripts and letters is the largest in the United States and is one of the two greatest collections in the world, along with the holdings of Britain’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Charles Dickens at 200 celebrates the bicentennial of the great writer’s birth in 1812 with manuscripts of his novels and stories, letters, books, photographs, original illustrations, and caricatures. Sweeping in scope, the exhibition captures the art and life of a man whose literary and cultural legacy is unrivaled.

Los Angeles, California

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books, California, literature, Los Angeles, sense of place, Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley recalls his L.A. childhood.

Down that path, toward the green Pontiac, I passed first a kumquat tree, a short line of small flowering plants that are less specific in my memory, and then a towering pomegranate tree. This skinny, exotic fruit sapling looked down on my father’s car. Beyond it was a lush but fraying banana tree that could grow but not produce fruit in the dry southern California climate.

This was my home: the couple so in love with each other, the chickens, the sun, trees and concrete. - Walter Mosley

Moby Dickens Bookshop, Taos, New Mexico

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books, bookstores, literature, Moby Dickens Bookshop, New Mexico, Taos

Moby Dickens Bookshop of Taos
124 A Bent Street, #6 Dunn House
Taos, New Mexico 87571
575-758-3050
http://www.mobydickens.com/
Although technically in Taos for the wool festival, I managed to pull myself away a couple of times to peruse and make purchases at Moby Dickens Bookshop near the Plaza. Having been to the bookstore on previous Taos visits, I always look forward to returning.  I’ve come to appreciate their excellent selection of books, especially a fine regional section.

World

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books, literature, sense of place, wilderness

Author Philip Connors chooses his “top 10 wilderness books.”

Wilderness in its purest sense may be gone, but wild remnants remain, and many of my favourite books in the genre celebrate a particular place (often in America), cherishing what is native and mourning what’s been lost. — Philip Connors

The Mabel Dodge Luhan House, Taos, New Mexico

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bookpath, Mabel Dodge Luhan House, New Mexico, sense of place, Taos

The Mabel Dodge Luhan House
240 Morada Lane
Taos, New Mexico
1-800-846-2235
http://www.mabeldodgeluhan.com/
And how I have loved it, this house built on different levels, a room or two at a time. – from Winter in Taos, by Mabel Dodge Luhan

From her first glimpse of Taos in 1916 until her death in 1962, the wealthy heiress, Mabel Dodge Luhan, claimed it as home. With her fourth husband, Tony Luhan, a Taos Pueblo Indian, she added on to an original 200-year-old adobe structure that bordered pueblo land, to create a home and a retreat for guests. The list of guests beckoned by the “difficult” and complicated Mabel Dodge Luhan is a long one, including D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Georgia O’Keefe, Robinson Jeffers, Thomas Wolfe, Thornton Wilder, and others. Taos would never be the same.

Today, The Mabel Dodge Luhan House is open to travelers. While staying in one of the rooms named for Mabel, Tony, and their guests, you can imagine the life of the house while Luhan presided. While Taos has changed since the 1920s and 1930s, The Mabel Dodge Luhan House remains a sanctuary. From the moment you walk through the gates into the “flagstone placita,” her world opens before you. Cottonwood, beech, and elm trees shade the “placita,” house, and birdhouse built for her beloved pigeons, “reared high up on thick, long posts.” There is breakfast in the dining room, with its portraits of Mabel and Tony, and corners for conversation and reading in the “big room.” Outside, the acqueia madre, or mother ditch, runs through the property on the west, while views move across pueblo lands to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains on the east side of the house. You can wander into town on a path through the park and visit Luhan’s modest gravesite in the Kit Carson Cemetery.

The Mabel Dodge Luhan House website offers visitor information, a brief biography of Mabel Dodge Luhan, a self-guided tour of house and grounds, and a list of upcoming workshops. If you can’t stay at Mabel’s house, like us on a recent visit, drop by – you’ll be rewarded literarily and historically.

The house grew slowly and it stretches on and on. At one end it piles up, for over the Big Room there is the bedroom where Tony sleeps, next to my room, and a big sleeping porch off of it; and from this room one climbs a steep little stairway up into a kind of lookout room, made of helioglass set in wooden columns on all four sides, where one has the views of all the valley, down to the village and beyond it to the horizon, up to the Pueblo and the Sacred Mountain, north to Frieda’s ranch on the side of Lobo Mountain, and the Colorado mountains beyond it. — from Winter in Taos, by Mabel Dodge Luhan

Millicent Rogers Museum, Taos, New Mexico

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art, biography, bookpath, millicent rogers museum, New Mexico, sense of place

Millicent Rogers Museum
1501 Millicent Rogers Road
Taos, NM 87571
http://www.millicentrogers.org/

Searching for Beauty: the Life of Millicent Rogers, by Cherie Burns

When visiting the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, New Mexico, you’re visiting the legacy of Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers. After years of living a glamorous lifestyle, her health in decline, Rogers retreated to Taos. She fell in love with place and culture and began collecting Native American jewelry and textiles. Rogers died in 1953 and in 1956 her family opened the Millicent Rogers Museum in her honor. The museum continues to pay tribute to Rogers as it “acquires, preserves, conducts research on, displays and interprets its collections to help educate the public about the art, history and cultures of the Native American, Hispanic and Euro-American peoples of the Southwest, emphasizing northern New Mexico and Taos.” As a visitor, the beauty of the collection touched me, including pottery by Maria Martinez, along with the building itself and the surrounding landscape. I also enjoyed perusing The Museum Store with its nicely selected offerings of jewelry, rugs, baskets, and books, including the recently published biography by Cherie Burns, Searching for Beauty: the Life of Millicent Rogers. The book captures Rogers’ life — her privileged background, luxurious lifestyle, and her last years in Taos. Reading it will no doubt enhance a visit to the Millicent Rogers Museum.

Milledgeville, Georgia; New York

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A Good Hard Look, Ann Napolitano, Flannery O'Conner, literature, sense of place

A Good Hard Look: a Novel
by Ann Napolitano

With author Flannery O’Conner as one of the main characters in A Good Hard Look, Ann Napolitano transports readers to Milledgeville, Georgia, where O’Conner spent the last years of her life at Andalusia, cared for by her mother and surrounded by her beloved peacocks and other birds. Napolitano honors O’Conner’s writing by taking readers into her characters’ inner lives, their tragedies, joys, and most of all their searches for the best way to live. I enjoyed A Good Hard Look so much that I’ve ordered Napolitano’s first book, Within Arm’s Reach (out of print), checked out O’Conner’s letters from the library, and look forward to someday following a bookpath to Andalusia and Milledgeville.

The birds didn’t care that it was the middle of the night, and they didn’t care who they were disturbing. They didn’t care that there was a wedding tomorrow, or that the groom, who had just arrived from New York City, was lying beneath a lace canopy at his in-laws’ house, paralyzed with fear. They didn’t care that his fiancée startled awake in the next room and toppled out of her high bed, and they certainly didn’t care that her face hit a stool on the way down. They didn’t care that the rest of the small Gerogia town was also awake, twitching in their beds like beached fish. – from A Good Hard Look

Ann Napolitano’s Website
Andalusia: Home of Flannery O’Conner Website

Japan

Haruki Murakami talks about his life and work with Sam Anderson, including his newest novel 1Q84.

For decades now, Murakami has been talking about working himself up to write what he calls a ‘comprehensive novel’ — something on the scale of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ one of his artistic touchstones. (He has read the book four times.) This seems to be what he has attempted with ’1Q84′: a grand, third-person, all-encompassing meganovel. It is a book full of anger and violence and disaster and weird sex and strange new realities, a book that seems to want to hold all of Japan inside of it — a book that, even despite its occasional awkwardness (or maybe even because of that awkwardness), makes you marvel, reading it, at all the strange folds a single human brain can hold.

St. Francis Cathedral, Santa Fe, New Mexico

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bookpath, Death Comes for the Archbishop, literature, sense of place, St. Francis Cathedral, Willa Cather

St. Francis Cathedral (dedicated in 1887)
131 Cathedral Place, Santa Fe, NM

There wasn’t much time for bookpathing on our recent trip to Santa Fe — one afternoon, night, morning — then on to Taos, but we did wander just beyond the Plaza to St. Francis Cathedral, its building by Father Jean Baptiste Lamy immortalized by Willa Cather in Death Comes for the Archbishop.  Visiting the cathedral with its statue of Lamy, fictionalized as Father Latour in Cather’s novel, brings Cather’s words to life, while her words inspire a more meaningful visit.

‘I have an old friend in Toulouse who is a very fine architect. I talked this matter over with him when I was last home. He cannot come himself; he is afraid of the long sea voyage, and not used to horseback travel. But he has a young son, still at his studies, who is eager to undertake the work. Indeed, his father writes me that it has become the young man’s dearest ambition to build the first Romanesque church in the New World.’

Collected Works Bookstore, Santa Fe, New Mexico

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bookpaths, bookstore, New Mexico, Santa Fe

Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeehouse
202 Galisteo Street, #A
Santa Fe, NM
(505) 988-4226
http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/

Recently, I enjoyed some time at Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe. An independent bookstore since 1978, the bookstore offers “an inventory of over 30,000 titles, including a large selection of local travel, Southwest and Native American history.”