Posts Tagged ‘books’

Egregious, Possibly Lethal, Most Likely Unintentional Disinformation

October 18, 2025

In June of 2018 a relatively unknown author published a book titled American Dirt. I didn’t hear anything about it but I’m not a fan of Oprah’s picks in general because I’m a literary snob and don’t start me on the New York Times. To be fair, they rate and rank what the public snarfs up like Scooby snacks and that does say something about us as a culture these days and I’ll just let that go. For now.

In any event, American Dirt was extremely well received. My first edition has a copyright date of 2019 and a publication date of 2020 despite the fact that the interwebs insist on June 2018. This is only relevant because I like to be precise when I get ready to pan a book. It looks like American Dirt hit the Oprah list first and then spent 36 weeks on the NYT best seller list. However, in January of 2020 the book got slammed. And by slammed, I mean enough significant writers slammed Ms Cummins into the proverbial wall so hard I didn’t think she’d ever find another publisher.

The cover of my book reads: “A Grapes of Wrath for our times.” Don Winslow

I didn’t know who Don Winslow was, so I looked him up. I don’t get it. Did he not read the book? Is he utterly out of touch? Does he write pulp fiction under the guise of an educated political activist, or did he fail to read the book? Unfortunately, there were internationally acclaimed writers pretty much spewing the same thing, not to mention Fucking Oprah. And yes, I do put Stephen King in this category because he is aware of what’s happening in the world. He didn’t read it. He could not have.

Which brings me to why I own this book. I am sensitive to cancel culture. Sometimes oversensitive. I don’t believe in book banning. Of any book. That means I don’t agree with the ‘cancelling’ or ‘unpublishing’ or ‘let’s be honest, banning’ of six books by Dr. Seuss published in a time when the racism we experience when we read them today would not have been relevant when published. They are, for better or worse, part our history. So we wiped them out. Ehhhh…. yeah, no. Bad. Same as banning The Grapes of Wrath. Or the Anarchist’s Cookbook. Or the Joy of Cooking (I made that one up).

I wanted to know why the literary community had turned on this author with a ferocity that I’ve honestly never seen in that industry. I ordered, received, and read the book because I believe we have in many cases gone too fucking far with what we define as appropriation. And that’s what I expected to find. A well written book about crossing the border written by a white woman. You know, like Barbara Kingsolver who I would never accuse of cultural appropriation despite the fact that she writes, primarily about cultures that are not her own. She’s also made some pretty serious political statements, and I believe they stand.

I read the book.

I actually cried. I wept. I sniveled. I threw the book across the room (that’s a one and only for me).

The Grapes of Wrath of our time.

My opinion, understand that, but it’s strong and I can defend it, but my opinion.

This is one of the most dangerous books in circulation today.

Why? Well, it’s a story about a family in Latin America. All but two, mother and son, are executed by the local cartel. Dad was a journalist. OK. I’m following.

Somehow, mom and kid actually get out of the home during the mass execution and get out of town. Somehow, they make their way to the border and find a coyote. So far, I’m following but I am having trouble with the logistics, but I make a leap faith because she writes well and the story is compelling.

It’s at the kind coyote point where the narrative falls apart and never comes back to any sort of reality.

When I read the book in 2022 immigration was an issue. Where I live, if people crossing the border can somehow get to this part of the country, this part of the country is prepared to receive them, protect them, house them, help them obtain legal status, and if necessary (Somalia specifically), get them across the other border.

Three years later all hell has broken loose and even in my state, where this shit simply does not happen, ICE is arriving and we’re trying to figure out what the fuck we’re going to do.

Circle yourself back to American Dirt. Oh oh.

Now. To my point (you knew I’d get there eventually). If you, or anyone, wants to read this book, that is your right and I hope it’s in your local library and if not, I hope they can get it for you.

But it can’t stay in my house on my shelves. It can’t.

So what to do? I guess I had a couple of choices. I could take it to my local library and get my face slapped. I could bring it to Goodwill, and they’d take it and someone would pick it up and I would be responsible for circulating something I find reprehensible. I can’t do it. Could I leave it on my shelves? Nope. I could throw it in the burn pile. That’s a statement, except I don’t believe in burning books unless they have become so worn and degraded as to be unreadable. I mean, the pages have to be falling out, the spine shot, and the pages so yellow the text can’t be read. If it’s a classic it gets a pass.

So. I can’t burn this book. I can’t keep this book. I can’t throw this book in the trash or recycling. I can’t put this book into circulation. I just can’t.

So. I buried it. I dug a hole this morning right up against my marsh as if I was going to bury a pet (except not so close to the marsh). I removed the jacket and tore off the cover and binding because those parts don’t always compost very well. I didn’t say anything over the corpse. I didn’t even take a picture. I just filled in the hole, knocked the dirt off my shovel, and walked away.

This post is not meant to be a book review. All that is context and without the context, my conundrum is meaningless.

It’s a look into my conscience, what I struggled with and why, and how I resolved what was a very real problem for me in a world where I have some very big problems right now.

Books matter. What we do with them matters. Just ask Ray Bradbury.

If you’d like to read about what happened when the literati (is that a word?) tore Ms Cummins to shreds, this is a good Op-ed from the NYT.

The Long Shadow of American Dirt – Pamela Paul, January 26, 2023

Note: For the record I don’t agree with the literati. I do think the book is way off base and dangerous, full of misinformation. But it was published. It was sold. It was read. By a lot of people. She had a right. She still does, and I’m glad I purchased the book because I wanted to support an author who had been exiled by her tribe. Bet you weren’t expecting that.

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Measure Thrice

October 1, 2025

I am now aware that my bed is out of alignment. Dammit. And also, the protective film is still on the outside of one of those windows and getting to it is going to be fun but not as fun as removing the wasp’s nest that is bigger than a football from the overhang at the peak of my house. Just outside the guestroom… there’s a thought. No, stop that. Thou shall not engage in wasp warfare.

I moved in before the house was finished. That was middle of June, 2024, and also, the house is still not finished but I ran out of money and it’s good enough. Except. Except it failed the blow test and I really need to resolve that. In any event, I moved in approximately fifteen months ago and failed to nest. Mostly. I did unbox and shelve the books and managed to purge between 100 and 150 of them which brought me down to under 600. I hoped.

When I say, unboxed and shelved I mean just that. Totally random. There’s a built in downstairs, one in the bedroom hallway, one in the bedroom, and another in the itty bitty guest room.

Several temporary homes ago, my youngest daughter asked if I really meant to read all these books again. I said, maybe. She asked, why haul them around? I thought about this and came up with one answer. I came up with another earlier this week. The first answer was because what I read affects how I see the world and therefore, who I am. When I walk past the shelves and run my fingers over the spines I am reminded of how I felt and what I thought when I read those books.

Many years ago, more than twenty, I’m sure, my second husband kept a log of the books I read. It should be noted that my second husband continued to give me books for my birthday and Christmas until the day he died. He researched them all year, and that guy got me. This is important.

One hundred books were logged. You read that correctly. One hundred books. Big books. Not many little books. Books that required focus and weren’t easily accessible (in other words, not beach books). When I read the list, there were at least half a dozen I didn’t recognize at all, but I believed him. There were many books I knew I’d read and I might be able to give you a basic plot line, but that was it. I consumed too fast. I left no time between the last page of one and the first of the next. I still do that. I think I do that to let go. Maybe.

This is the second reason I keep those books. As I run my fingers across the spines I notice that I don’t recognize all of the titles. Well hot damn! It’s as if I have an entire list of unread books just waiting for me to pick up. To be fair, there are one or two or twelve that I intentionally reread periodically but we won’t get into that just now.

Oh. There’s a third reason. Of all the books I have not purged, my second husband gave me eighty percent of them. How can I let those pieces of him go? I cannot.

Phew.

Where was I? Nesting. I didn’t do it. The books remained completely random and every photograph and piece of art lived in a closet or under my bed. Photographs of my children I carefully hung in gallery frames. Photographs of me and my brother. A photograph of my step-mother and another of my father that tug my heart hard. A wedding photo of my older daughter and my son-in-law.

When a person denies themselves these things they are denying themselves a home, a home base, a safe space. I hung in the balance of not there and not here and it sucked but I couldn’t move. About a week ago I started moving.

I photographed all of the bookcases, shelf by shelf, chunk by chunk and then emailed them to myself. I expanded each photograph and made a spreadsheet. Author, title, shelving title (remove The and A at the start of a title), location, and go to. I had to guess at go to based on the number of books on each shelf. Then I started pulling books from shelves and putting them sort of in order so that I new where they should land. I carried them up and down the stairs in a laundry basket and this took days.

I got to know my library all over again. Some books made me cry, some left me with a profound sense of grounding, some made me laugh (because Christopher Moore and Tom Robbins are REALLY funny), some are from other people that I will never read again but will keep forever, and there’s Stephen King’s Gunslinger series. I finally tossed all the REALLY old paperbacks that were no longer readable. I had some that belonged to my mother with her name on the inside. Books she would have read in high school or college. That was hard and I might retrieve them from the recycling bin. Maybe.

My library contains five linear feet of nonfiction. Half of that came from my father’s library (historian), a good chunk from my university years, and some I just seemed to acquire. I’m not counting the cookbooks. I have a lot of books about Israel and also Palestine. I have medical books and mental health books and biographies. Who knew?! Not me.

In all that I only have four hundred and forty books. This very exciting. This means I can acquire one hundred and sixty books before I consider myself the cat lady of books. My intention is to liberate most of my father’s Napolean collection (it’s kinda big) and anything prior to WWII. I’ll wait until he’s dead. He’d notice. He’s already lied and said he got rid of all the Napolean and then he hid those books so I wouldn’t find them. Hoarder. I’m also going to take anything by Bernard Cornwell unless I already have it.

About those paintings over my bed…

I measured THREE TIMES AND ALSO USED A LEVEL. I’m leaving them as they are for a bit. I’m not sure why. They’re very important and my second husband matted and framed them for me. Blow up the photo if you can. They are three watercolors of the same still life. I picked the flowers from the garden and stuck them in a small pitcher. I sat with my oldest daughter (the last baby wasn’t there yet) and my son on the floor with sun streaming into the woods and helped them draw out the forms. I made up their palettes, taped down the paper, and we got to work. This was the summer of 1996 which makes us five, ten, and thirty-two. I remember exactly how I felt and if I had to leave everything behind, including my books, those are the three things I’d take anyway.

There is very little white space (blank wall) in my house because the lower level, facing east is ALL window, one end to the other. The southern side is window, back door, and wood burn stove area. The west side has a little room and so does the bottom of the stairwell. This house is a story and a half which means no attic and four foot walls before the pitch begins. If the middle of the house staircase didn’t have walls on either side, I’d have a problem.

With two exceptions, everything is up. Nothing else was measured or leveled or anything except me pounding a nail into a wall and slapping the painting or photo up. It looks like this:

Bang, bang, bang and done!

One photograph with each baby in order left to right, dob 1986, 1991, and 2000.

Because I went on and on about them, here are two of the three upstairs bookcases. Why yes, that *is* the top of a china cabinet. Heh.

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