PARROT TALK

Sprucing up our  Little Free Library a bit  this morning for our Bootleggers visit tomorrow, as well as curating with the another  holiday weekend in mind, and looking I suppose for some  beach-reads,  I spied among recent donations,  some  vintage hard-backed Earle Stanley Gardner, as well as some Steven King,

Other fiction turned up Isabel Allende’s The Japanese Lover,  and Zoot Suit Murders, local-author Thomas Sanchez’ first novel.

I also spot George Orwell’s  Animal Farm, which I swear is the same edition I read as freshman in High School, circa 1961,

For those planing on spending a good bit of time in the chaise I’ll also include,  what is perhaps the most appropriate selection of all for this Memorial Day weekend, a just-donated copy of Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation.

For those non-fiction buffs ready to do a real deep-dive at the beach and not surface till Tuesday, may I suggest , a tome from  the bestselling author Steven Ambrose,  Undaunted Courage,  the definitive book on Lewis and Clark’s exploration of the Louisiana Purchase, the most momentous expedition in American history and one of the great adventure stories of all time.

Coincidentally, and a perfect corollary to the just-mentioned Ambrose volume, nestled in this same new batch of books, is  the staff-recommended Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. This is  Campbell McGrath’s  epic book-length poem that chronicles, in imagined journal entries, the remarkable journey of  19 year-old George Shannon,  the youngest member of that same Lewis and Clark expedition, who, on August 24th, 1804, early in the expedition, off by himself to retrieve some horses, gets lost himself for 16 days in what is now Nebraska and South Dakota.

I might add,  for those whose deep-dive is a real one, not a rhetorical one, I turned up a copy of  Reef Fish Identification, Florida-Caribbean-Bahamas, a comprehensive fish ID book designed for divers.

Continuing on a  non-fiction bent, I find, ready to be shelved under Animal Behavior,  When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals,  which offers through anecdotes,  proof of the existence of animal emotion, and, also worth mentioning, certainly not something I would be apt to toss in my suitcase before heading on vacation, Over The Edge: Death in The Grand Canyon, described as “Gripping accounts of all known fatal mishaps in the most famous of the World’s Seven Natural Wonders. 

For the more scholarly there is what looks to be an ethnography,  titled: Treme-Race and Place in a New Orleans Neighborhood.

For the less-scholarly,  but minutiae-driven  Beat Generation  crowd,  there is Carolyn Cassady’s,  Off The Road, My Years with Cassady, Kerouc, and Ginsberg,

For those craving humor there is some David Sedaris,  and, worth noting,  The Darwin Awards,  Wendy Northcutt’s best-selling, true stories of those human beings who improve the gene pool by removing themselves from it in a sublimely idiotic fashion.

You know, for those of you that may never even see the beach this weekend,  or don’t really care to crack a book, feel free to grab a book to carry into the cool, recesses of the bar anyway, it makes  a great conversation starter, not like you need one to get someone talking over a cold one at The Parrot..

Have a great Memorial Day weekend!