June from Patty and Lynne - Books to consider

Once again, I found unopened mail from the previous month. If I had not opened it, I think that means I have not posted it. Apologies if these are repeats. I'm pretty sure they are not because I do not recall talking about marbling. The topic has come up a couple times LINK to previously mentioned marbling I have marbled. It's lots of fun. 

While I have not yet read any of these books - two of them are recommended by our pen pal Clover.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek 

and The Book Woman’s Daughter.

Another book that I have on reserve from my library is 

MAILMAN: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home, by Stephen Starring Grant

Here are a couple excerpts from the review in the NYTimes:

Grant found himself grudgingly delivering the mail in middle age (he was 50) because he’d lost his job as a marketing consultant. He had a wife, two teenage daughters and a tiny but worrisome nugget of prostate cancer. He needed the job for health insurance and to ward off the biggest dog, depression. Several years earlier, he’d moved his family from Brooklyn back to his hometown, Blacksburg, Va., in the Blue Ridge Mountains, so that his children would grow up with grass under their feet. Until he was laid off, he still commuted regularly to New York and other major cities.

<snip>

He liked the days when orders of baby chicks came in, though delivering the heavy bags of chicken feed that followed was a bummer. People gave him cookies; he often got free coffee at Starbucks. He got a lot of steps in, often 15,000 a day.

<snip>

The United States has the largest postal system on the planet, and it accepts no taxpayer dollars. It pays for itself. Mail carriers may grouse and weep and have dark senses of humor, but they have a camaraderie that resembles that of line cooks. They are proud of their work and have genuine integrity, he writes.

<snip>

Grant is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but he does not say, in “Mailman,” if he ever took a stab at being a full-time writer.

<snip>

Has he read Charles Bukowski’s “Post Office” or J. Robert Lennon’s “Mailman,” those wildcat novels, or Eudora Welty’s story “Why I Live at the P.O.”? Does he know that Charles Mingus delivered the mail, and that John Prine wrote some of his best songs while doing so? Has he ever listened to “Please Mr. Postman” or “Return to Sender”? Has he seen “Il Postino”? Is he aware that William Faulkner quit the post office because he didn’t want to be at “the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp”? 

OK - that's about half the review -- enough.