I’d send you a flower, a sunflower bright

August 13, 2009 | Iowa

Books: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

August 10, 2009 | Books

I just finished reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. It took a while to get going, but once it did, it was great. I might just have to read the other two books to the trilogy.

A flight of fancy on a windswept field

August 7, 2009 | Iowa

This woke me up at 7 o’clock Sunday morning. Jerk.

Whatever they spray on the fields will kill all the lightning bugs. I wonder if it works on mosquitoes too. They’re horrific this year.

Books: Iowa books & authors

August 6, 2009 | Books,Iowa

As promised, here’s a list of Iowa books and authors.

Memoirs

• The Desert Pilgrim by Mary Swander, Iowa’s 2009 Poet Laureate
• Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Bret Witter with Vicki Myron
• Eat, Drink & Be Merry by Merry Corbin
• A Good Day’s Work: An Iowa Farm in the Great Depression by Dwight W. Hoover
• Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl by Carol Bodensteiner
• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson
• Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish
• Man Killed by Pheasant: And Other Kinships by John Price
• Mrs. Steffy: Our Mother, the Morticianby Doris C. Steffy
• Standing Tall: A Memoir of Tragedy and Triumph by C. Vivian Stringer, who led the Hawkeyes women’s basketball team to the 1993 Final Four and the first coach in NCAA women’s history to bring three teams to the Final Four. She is now head coach of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team and a member of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.
• Summer at Tiffany by Marjorie Hart, who is in her 80s and living in California. She tells the story of spending the summer of 1945 in New York and working at Tiffany’s with her friend and classmate at the University of Iowa.

Novels

• Home: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson, who teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Iowa City. She has written several other books, including Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and Housekeeping. She also wrote two non-fiction books, Mother Country and The Death of Adam. Home is a companion piece to Gilead and a variation of the prodigal-son parable. The son, Jack Boughton, returns in 1957 to Gilead, Iowa, where his story unfolds.
• Lassiter Hill by Daniel Dundon, who is a former reporter and editor for the Waterloo Courier and the Cedar Rapids Gazette. He now lives in Jacksonville, Fla. Lassiter Hill is a novel inspired by an Iowa murder case.
• The River Road (American Fiction) by Tricia Currans-Sheehan, who grew up on a farm along the Des Moines River. She now lives in Sioux City and teaches at Briar Cliff University. The River Road is the sequel to her first book, The Egg Lady and Other Neighbors.

Places

• Denison, Iowa: Searching for the Soul of America Through the Secrets of a Midwest Town by Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael Williamson. Maharidge lived in Denison for a year to record daily details of a small town in Iowa. Maharidge and Williamson, both Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, have collaborated on books before.
• Oneota Flow: The Upper Iowa River and Its People (American Land & Life)by David S. Faldet, a professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. He grew up in the Decorah area and is in the fifth generation of his family living in the river basin.
• The Oxford Project by Stephen G. Bloom and photographer and artist Peter Feldstein. Bloom also wrote Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America. Feldstein took photographs of 670 residents of Oxford (population 676) in 1984. He did it again 20 years later and asked Bloom to interview people. Everyone has a story, he said. Both teach at the University of Iowa.
• Prairie City, Iowa: Three seasons at home by Douglas Bauer, a journalist who returned to his hometown after leaving it as a teen-ager. He wrote several other books, including the novel Book of Famous Iowans.

True crime

• Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America’s Heartland (Bur Oak Book) by Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf

Books: Growing up Country

August 5, 2009 | Books

I met Carol Bodensteiner in April, and I recently read her book, Growing up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl.

What a treat! Bodensteiner is a wonderful storyteller. She shows readers what she saw as a girl growing up on a farm in Iowa in the 1950s — from learning how to drive a tractor to the meaning of making a promise and keeping your word. Even if you didn’t grow up on a farm, this is a great coming-of-age story.