Tag: Reading

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Home Life

What Gets Attention?

Lilac bush on March 22, 2026.

Ambient temperature reached 87 degrees on Saturday in Big Grove. On Sunday it dropped to the 50s, and Monday, it was below freezing. Not really Spring, is it? The lilacs appear to be surviving the temperature fluctuation… so far. It is hard to know what will hold.

While it’s still cold, I’ve been working on The Great Book Sort — more boxes of books to the public library used book sale, and a growing “to be read” bookcase. The project asks a question in 2026 America: What will get our attention?

Books are an easy answer. They are disconnected from the digital world and the daily discipline of reading at least 25 pages lends itself to both respite from society’s noise and engagement in new things. That hour a day with a book, and selecting the next one, are needed forms of intellectual engagement.

What else?

Let’s cross off some things. We don’t watch television in our house — no antenna nor subscription to cable television service. I am not a gamer. The extent of my computer gaming was stopping once at a truck stop during a blizzard and playing a Pac-Man console for a quarter. Mother showed me how to play Solitaire on her work computer when I visited her. Radio is something for listening in the car, or while working in the garage. It never gains my complete attention. Since the Saturday lineup on Public Radio was disassembled — about the time Garrison Keillor left A Prairie Home Companion the second time — that era ended. Mostly I listen for favorite tunes and to see which political groups are advertising.

If I know you and you send me an email, I will read it. Email is my most used social media application. I remember presenting a case for email to a company I worked for because it connected everyone in a global organization at my previous employer. They did not sign up right away. I also read texts, but contrary to popular culture, they are less immediate to me than email.

When our child streams on Twitch, I turn it on and have it in the background. My main interest is the sound of a familiar voice, someone with whom I have been since their beginning.

I read two newspapers: The Cedar Rapids Gazette and the Solon Economist. The former recently changed hands and format. The jury is out on whether I will continue. The latter was recently purchased by the Daily Iowan and is gravitating toward being a college newspaper in most respects. Two of them for now, about 10 minutes for each edition.

Bluesky is my social media account and I check in repeatedly throughout the day. I follow 88 other accounts and there is not a lot of action. It is a good source of national and world news.

The rest of my attention goes to work, family, and a few friends, mostly centered around home, cooking, cleaning, writing, home repairs, and gardening. On a chilly day most of the work is indoors.

I am currently reading The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu. The premise and business model most often used has been providing free diversion in exchange for a moment of consideration. Such attention is harvested, then sold to the highest-bidding advertiser. I’m sure my attention has been harvested. With some products, I’m not even aware of it, yet I can think of only a few instances where it hooked me.

For example, I watched the appearance of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. That summer, I bought a trade paperback book about the Beatles at the corner drug store. In the fall I went with Mother to the King Korn Stamp Redemption Center. The television show had me thinking I could be a musician. I remember a light snow falling on us as we returned to the car with my new Kay acoustic guitar.

As The Great Book Sort continues, I harvest my own memories while touching books I bought for many reasons, the least of which was whether it was advertised. When spending my attention on a life imperfectly lived, there is hope I can avoid the pitfalls of the attention economy.

Sometimes I simply want to walk on the state park trail and pay attention to the sunrise of a new day. For now, that is enough.

Pre-dawn light on the state park trail, March 23, 2026.
Categories
Creative Life

Drugstore Paperbacks

Mass-market paperback books.

When I had a newspaper route, I stopped at the corner drugstore and occasionally bought mass-market paperback books. They are characterized by their small size (roughly 4.25 x 6.87 inches), lower price point, and widespread distribution in places like airports, grocery stores, and drugstores. I have so many of them that I built a special shelf to store them near the ceiling.

They were never archival quality, and a typical one from the 1960s has yellowing pages due to the cheaper paper from which it was made. The pages grow increasingly brittle with age. They are what they are: a record of what I was reading. They are subject to the same curation as any of my books.

One of the first I bought was The True Story of the Beatles by Billy Shepherd, illustrated by Bob Gibson. It was promoted as “The original book about the Beatles,” with photographs published in the U.S. “for the first time.” After seeing them on February 9, 1964, on The Ed Sullivan Show, I bought this book that summer and, in the fall, went with my mother to the King Korn stamp redemption center and got a new Kay guitar to play. Our family members were Beatles fans.

Another early purchase was The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill. Several World War II veterans lived in our neighborhood and spoke about their experiences. My cohort of grade schoolers descended on downtown Davenport to meet up for matinees at the several movie theaters operating there. World War II films, including this one, were de rigueur. The 50-cent Crest Book reported, “Now a spellbinding motion picture starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough. A United Artists release.” The printing of my copy was October 1965. I can’t say how many times I saw this film—yet many. That’s how grade schoolers rolled in the 1960s.

I went through a period when I collected mass-market paperbacks written and popular in the 1960s. Among them are On the Road by Jack Kerouac, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen, Bound for Glory by Woody Guthrie, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War by Che Guevara, Prison Journals of a Priest Revolutionary by Philip Berrigan, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People by Lenny Bruce, Daybreak by Joan Baez, and Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone by Richard Fariña. Just typing these titles is a trip down memory lane.

In part, that is the problem. I moved past the 1960s in my intellectual development, and these books are unlikely to be reread. I envision more culling of less useful mass-market paperbacks as I move through this project. The special shelf space sets the limit on how many I retain.

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Reviews

Book Review: This House of Sky

This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind by Ivan Doig is exactly what the title suggests. Descriptions of the author’s rural Montana life are vivid in their presentation of the hard-scrabble ranching life in which Doig came up. Out of that challenging youth — farming, sheep herding, haying, rural community — he became a writer giving voice to western life.

“In my Montana upbringing, I had worked in a lambing shed, picked rock from grainfields, driven a power buckrake in haying time and a D-8 Cat pulling a harrow during summer fallowing and a grain truck at harvest, herded sheep, trailed sheep, cussed sheep — even dug a well by hand and whitewashed a barn –and now I didn’t seem to be finding other people who had done any of that,” Doig wrote in the introduction.

I worked eight years on a farm that raised lambs, although not on the scale of Doig’s Montana. It was an entry point into a life I hadn’t known existed. My experience provided me a way into This House of Sky that many readers might not have. Life experiences can be a form a literacy regardless of how many books we read.

My grandmother grew up in farming communities in Minnesota and Illinois, and could likely relate to the grandmother in the book. Working from a home, while isolated on a farm, took a lot of knowledge, skills, and energy. Such women literally made a home from almost nothing. While Grandmother did not read a lot of books, I might have persuaded her to read this one.

When This House of Sky was published in 1978, many Americans still had farm connections. Today, far fewer do as that knowledge of hand work was eclipsed by mechanization. Today people don’t harvest hay the same way Doig describes before he left home.

Is there a modern readership for the book?

While I brought farm experience to the book, other readers might bring something else. This book can meet readers where they live. Doig’s detailed description of Montana has many common hooks, including the arc of his’ father’s emphysema, the culture of nine bars and saloons in White Sulphur Springs, and the role of women and men in western society.

Whatever a reader brings to This House of Sky, there is a thoughtful world to explore and briefly inhabit.

Highly recommend.

Categories
Living in Society

Sunrise at Month’s End

Sunrise over Lake Macbride on Jan. 30, 2026.

This January I’m thankful to have gotten back into the writing groove so quickly. I finished the first draft of my book and am a third finished with the first major edit. The narrative and language keeps getting stronger. If I did nothing else, that would be an accomplishment.

I managed to get outdoors for my 30-minute walk every day but one. In past years I struggled to get exercise during winter but I remedied that. Among other things I remedied was sleepless nights. After using artificial intelligence to generate some ideas, I developed my own process to fall asleep and stay asleep until it is time to get up. I’ve now been getting seven to eight hours of sleep each night.

Reading seven books this month was in line with my plans. February should be another good month, especially if it stays cold.

Friday I attended a visitation for a friend’s spouse. The older I get, the more I feel a sense of loss regardless of how long or how well I knew the deceased. Luckily several other people I knew were there and we were able to talk about more than a few common things. We could go on living.

The current schedule is to start the first garden seeds indoors on Feb. 7. The year is rushing toward us with unrelenting fury. A lot remains to be done before spring’s promise arrives.

Categories
Living in Society

Winter Reading 2025-2026

One use for my sorting tables: picking the next book to read.

The die is cast for 2026 winter reading. Books in this photo have been recently acquired and they, along with those already read match the number of books I read in January and February last year. I shut off acquisitions for now to focus on reading.

The first three books were The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll, The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher, and The Marx Bros. Scrapbook by Groucho Marx and Richard J. Anobile. Currently The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning by Julene Bair is half finished by my bedside. The key to winter reading is to pick books that are both excellent and draw a person into the narrative. These four do both.

My standard is to read at least 25 pages per day. In my youth, the number was 50 yet over time I found 25 is sustainable. In winter it is easy to read more and I do. For example, Monday I was scheduled to work in the garage. When I arrived, it was too cold to work very long, so I went back to my book.

Reading takes about an hour per day, which is not a lot of time. Mostly, I read in bed in the morning before my morning regimen. However, I make sure to finish at least 25 pages whenever and wherever I read.

The Read Recently page on this blog lists books I read over the last number of years. If you are on Goodreads, find me there to follow me. Like any avid reader, I am always looking for what’s next.

Categories
Creative Life

Toward New Reading

Chart of 2025 books read by month from Goodreads.

I decided to call 2025 finished with 71 books read. I set my goal at a book per week and exceeded it. Yay!

Goodreads is great for me because it provides satisfaction when I finish each book and rate it. Likewise, I refer to the historical information often. The above chart came via email last week and tells a story about which I hadn’t thought. June through August is the busiest time in the garden. Likewise September through November are taken up with kitchen work processing the harvest. Seems natural I would read fewer books during those six months. The seasonality just never occurred to me.

I post each book I finish on Goodreads and at the Read Recently page of this blog if interested. I also keep a spreadsheet.

Book reading appears to be a lost art in American society. I understand people are busy taking in information from the large number of sources that exploded after Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. The web was popularized through the adaptation of web browsers in the mid-1990s. We bought our first home computer and logged in via dial-up on April 21, 1996. After that, it was Katie bar the gate with many more words than could be read by a single human. I think even artificial intelligence machines have trouble getting through all of it. All that said, I sort of understand it, yet believe individuals reading books is an important kind of experience that rewards us in tangible ways.

Online apps are not for everyone, yet if you are on Goodreads, I’d love to see what you are reading. Find me here and join my community!

Categories
Reviews

Book Review: Packinghouse Daughter

Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir by Cheri Register is a book I wouldn’t have found except for patronizing an excellent local used bookstore. They have a deal where you set an amount of money to spend, tell them your interests, and they locate books that match. I have yet to be disappointed by their choices. One of the interests I presented was in memoirs written by female authors. They likely didn’t know the story of Wilson & Company was connected to me in multiple ways.

My father worked in a hog processing facility with a kill floor and everything else mentioned in this book through to the fertilizer processing tanks. He died in a plant accident in 1969. I worked there too, for two summers while at university. I even crawled into one of the large processing tanks to help a millwright fix it, learning about lockout/tagout for the first time. The first part of the book resonates completely with my experience, even though Register was older than I am. It is useful to know this history of Wilson & Company in Albert Lea, Minnesota exists.

Register claims hesitancy about writing the memoir about Albert Lea because it was her father who worked at Wilson’s and experienced many of the issues she mentions. I don’t know who can better tell this story than such a daughter whose father worked there and was invested in the job and packing plant employee community. She did the research and the narrative is better for it. She could have gone easier on herself. Register died March 7, 2018.

I was struck by the description of people moving from farms to the city to work in meat packing. This was true of my family where my maternal great grandparents left central Illinois to live in Davenport in retirement. Four or five of their daughters worked in a defense plant making coats during World War II. My maternal grandmother did, and also worked a stint at the Oscar Mayer hog processing plant where Father and I worked. That cohort is now buried in local cemeteries. This part of the book also resonates with my experience.

An exodus from farming and rural areas continues today as agriculture has grown larger and requires fewer workers because of computer automation and changes in operations. Those who relocate, for lack of a better term, are not choosing meatpacking as a profession — or even as a job. With consolidation in the meatpacking industry and increased automation, there are simply fewer positions available. It is hard, dirty work as well. As a result, the job-driven movement from rural areas to cities no longer exists in the same way it did in Albert Lea during the period covered by this book.

I found Register’s narrative deeply resonated with my experiences. It is must reading for anyone interested in the specific history of Wilson & Company or in meat packing culture. With changes in the industry happening post-WWII era, that culture would disappear without books like this.

Categories
Writing

The Great Sort – Part IV

North wall bookshelf after The Great Sort.

Calling this project done for now. I went through all remaining boxes in the two stacks and prepped two more boxes for the library used book sale. There are five empty boxes and a good amount of new stuff placed in old boxes. This was the first major sort of my books since they arrived in 1993 and I built the shelves. I’m satisfied I have a better idea of what is available, which was the point.

Notes:

I found the rest of my books related to slavery and African-American studies. The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois is important to the literary discussion of the United States. If a 21st Century canon was relevant or possible, he would be in it. I don’t expect to reread the book, yet it earned a place on the shelf. I studied Stanley Elkins’ book Slavery in graduate school. I would be curious to reread it, and also read the criticisms of it. Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington moves from box to shelf as well. On my to-do list is rearranging my African-American studies books.

I had more than a hundred business books. It was a really complete set as my work at the transportation and logistics company ended in 2009. The only ones I am keeping are Dale Carnegie’s books, which include one owned by my father, and an autographed copy of Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming. I picked Deming up for a buck at a used bookstore in Sweetwater, Texas during the rattlesnake roundup.

I intentionally left political books alone. I have all the presidential memoirs I know about, beginning with Truman. The next reading here is if Barack Obama ever finishes the second volume of his presidential memoir. I’m not a fan of Trump and to my knowledge, he hasn’t written a memoir from his first term. Like with Nixon, I’ll likely wait until he is dead before considering purchasing any memoir. I bought a copy of Mike Pence’s 2022 vice presidential memoir So Help Me God for a buck at the library used book sale. It is occupying the spot where Obama’s book will go when published. Pence seems to have tried to tell a normal story of that period. Will know more if I get around to reading it. Life is short. So many books with limited time.

As I approach a new year of writing, I feel refreshed by The Great Sort. I feel better aware of my stuff and know where to find things again. Highly recommend it if you have a wall of boxes hanging about your home.

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Writing

The Great Sort – Part III

New light for these classics.

For years, my books about North American indigenous culture were tucked away in a box. I decided I was wrong about them and with newly opened space because of The Great Sort, I put them on a shelf. These are in addition to the works by and about Black Hawk which I always kept out, and those of Hyemeyohsts Storm which I kept out, yet now boxed away. I wrote about Chuck Storm as we called him here. The next step is to incorporate this literature into a reading plan.

Of these books, the author that might best fit into a canon of American Literature (if such a thing existed or was possible) is N. Scott Momaday, whose House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. There are others here that remain quite good. I read what I read of these beginning in 1970 while at university. I don’t know where this is going, yet they are out and available in a prominent space. I won’t miss seeing them daily and expect to read some of them.

I mentioned the Time magazine purge. I came across a dozen copies of Harpers Magazine dated 1938 and 1942. I bought them at either an auction or a yard sale for a buck. They used to be property of the Mount Carroll, Illinois public library, yet now find themselves in The Big Sort. There are familiar authors inside: John Dos Passos, E.B. White, Peter Drucker, Margaret Bourke-White, Glenway Wescott, Eudora Welty, T.S. Eliot, Franz Werfel, and probably others I should recognize. At the stop on my desk, enroute to the recycling bin, I notice how many pages of book advertisements there are. The December 1938 issue has 44 pages by most of the major publishers. That says something about the role Harpers played in popular culture. If that didn’t give it away, the advertisement for New York department store Hammacher Schlemmer did.

There are four mover’s boxes of vinyl records which I will attempt to sell locally. I asked our child about them and there was only a single record of interest: Beethoven’s Fidelio. The ones I will keep are a small, undetermined number. I will keep the Red Gallagher album because he autographed it for me and grew up a block away from our home. I spent a good part of my life listening to these hundreds of records. While I still have a turntable, I need a new amplifier and don’t want to spend the money. Probably should sell the turntable as well.

I’m writing on Christmas Day and noticed how many empty boxes there are. The purge of books and magazines is having the desired effect. There are more boxes than things on the sorting tables. At this point, I will find something to fill most of the boxes, although I am weeding out different styles of boxes because I need them for book shipments to the public library. While I just began The Big Sort, it feels like it has been going on for a much longer time. In a way, it has.

Categories
Writing

The Great Sort – Part II

Books re-discovered during the Great Sort.

When handling hundreds of books long packed away, a few will stand out. Not only do I want to keep those in this photo, I want to read or re-read them next year. It’s part of the process of the Great Sort.

While living in Mainz, Germany, I had a stamp made with my military address and Social Security number on it. Back then, we viewed the Social Security number as unique to us and if we got separated from any possession, the rightful owner could be found. It was embossed into our dog tags. We put it on clothing, imprinted it inside field boots, in books, on everything that would take ink. That was short-term thinking from a perspective of how many people today would like to get hold of that number and use it for theft and other evil purposes. Wasn’t the best idea.

A substantial part of the Great Sort has been spent searching for these stamped locators and either blacking them out or cutting them off.

It has been hard to persist more than a few hours without getting impatient and stuffing books back into another box and into the new stacks I am building. At that point I must resist the urge, turn off the lights, and find something else to do. I want this to be a final sort. I’m labeling and dating the outside of the boxes so I know what’s in them and when I last touched the books. I doubt I will return to many of the boxes.

In the display area of my writing space I have about 3,000 books. I pulled out and boxed all the books of music. The vinyl long playing records will get boxed, reunited with the others I have, and then finally disposed of. This creates more space for active books and some of it will fill with the three-ring binders I am making as I write my autobiography. It should be a more useful (to a writer) library.

I want the Great Sort to be finished by Spring. I think that is doable even as I enter seedling planting time next month, especially if I stick with it a couple hours per day. The purpose of the work is to improve how I store research materials and become a better writer. I’m hopeful at this point. all of that will be the Great Sort’s outcome.

Mailing label from the first apartment where I wrote after university.