Dog Days and Dog Books
When I was kid, I read a book in which all the humans in London—maybe all over England—fell asleep, and the dogs had to figure out what to do. They passed messages to each other by barking at night, and many of them gathered in Trafalgar Square to await directions from Sirius the Dog Star. Written by Dodie Smith, The Starlight Barking was a sequel to The Hundred and One Dalmatians. It was less famous, but I loved it more.
Sirius the Dog Star, part of the constellation Canis Major, or the Great Dog, is where the dog days of summer get their name. Canis Major isn’t visible to us in the summer, because it’s up during the day, but it’s still there! Sirius is the brightest star in the sky that we can’t see. Apparently people used to think that–because it was so bright–it added significant heat to the atmosphere, combining with the sun to make things extra hot. Thus the dog days.
Today, August 26, is National Dog Day. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that National Dog Day falls in the summertime, but I’m guessing it’s not.
In my house, every day is dog day. My dog Rosie—half pitbull, half Siberian husky—has one blue eye, one green eye, and one very bad habit: If you leave books on the floor—or even on the coffee table—she sometimes eats them. For this reason, she will not be the Celia Bookshop bookstore dog.
Beth, however, has a perfect bookstore dog, a handsome, aging labradoodle named Hugo. Hugo is tall and curly and gentle. Kids love him. We’re hoping he’ll enjoy hanging out at Celia and wagging at the customers.
A Bookstore Class Project–With Dogs
With only about a month to go before we open the store, I’ve been thinking back across the two years Beth and I have spent learning and planning. One of the first things we did was take an online class from the Professional Booksellers School. The final assignment was to put together a display on a theme of our choice, with a variety of books and also non-book items (“sidelines” in bookstore parlance).
The theme I chose was dogs.
Really, dogs was the only theme I could choose—the only theme about which I had enough books and also non-book items on hand at home to assemble into anything. I called the display A Dog Runs Through It, taking the title from a book of poetry my mother published in 2018, and which I used as the display’s centerpiece.
My mother loved bookstores. They drew her in and enfolded her, making her happy in a way few other places did. I don’t ever remember her leaving a bookstore without making a purchase. If I was with her, she always bought me a book too. When my kids were growing up, if they were in the bookstore, they each got a book as well.
My mother died two-and-a-half years ago, about six months before Beth and I dreamed Celia Bookshop up. I often think how much she would have loved it. Also, how many books she would have bought from us!
But I’m sure I’ll feel her spirit there.
On quiet afternoons, I’ll imagine her wandering through the aisles, picking up books, reading a few pages, putting them down again. Books which, as a poem of hers, “The Bookstall,” puts it, are like
freshly baked loaves
waiting on their shelves
to be broken open.
In honor of National Dog Day, Celia Bookshop has assembled a list of books about dogs on our Bookshop.org page. You’ll find fiction, poetry, dog training manuals, kids books, and a volume of David Hockney’s beautiful paintings of his dogs.
Recommendations
Will and Testament
By Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund
Dad died five months ago, which was either great timing or terrible, depending on your point of view. Personally, I don’t think he would have minded going unexpectedly; I was even tempted when I first heard to think he might have fallen on purpose, before I knew the whole story. It was too much like a plot twist in a novel for it just to be an accident.
In the weeks leading up to his death, my siblings had become embroiled in a heated argument about how to share the family estate, the holiday cabins on Hvaler.
And just two days before Dad’s fall, I had joined in, siding with my older brother against my two younger sisters.
Not only are those the opening two paragraphs of Vigdis Hjorth’s obsessive, immersive novel about a woman struggling to escape the shadow of an event from her distant past, they comprise the entire first section of the book. This is a novel of many short sections—not exactly chapters—that push forward in time but also gradually return to earlier events, engaging the reader in the construction of the difficult jigsaw puzzle that is our narrator’s life.
Hjorth uses this opening to introduce her major subjects: the narrator’s father, the pain of differing points of view within families, and death. She will return to all of this, and the specific question of the holiday cabins on the island of Hvaler, again and again as the narrator tries to assimilate what happened in her past and what she is going to do about her future.
Here is how this amazing novel came into my hands.
Every time I go into a bookstore, I ask the bookseller to handsell me something. It doesn’t always work out, but when I visited Three Lives & Company in Lower Manhattan a few months back, owner Toby Cox handed me Will and Testament, a novel by a writer I’d never even heard of.
Handselling is the good bookseller’s superpower.
The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound
By Raymond Antrobus
In 2019, at a turn in my life, when I had just been announced as the winner of an award for my first poetry collection, I was ushered into a back room and took a call from a BBC journalist. I put the phone on loudspeaker and angled it toward the microphone on my hearing aids.
“Congratulations, Mr. Antrobus!” came the low-pitched BBC voice. I could make out around 60 percent of what was said, then I filled the rest in myself. This is how most spoken conversations work for me: I gather up the words I can hear and guess at the missing sounds.
Most of the life chronicled in this intriguing, seductive memoir is not the part where deaf, Black, British poet Raymond Antrobus is winning prizes and talking to BBC journalists. Mostly, instead, he writes about when he was young and struggling. We learn a lot about his East London childhood, including before he was diagnosed as deaf at age seven, when he was constantly missing so much of what his teachers said that he was thought slow and disobedient.
“How does a child make sense of words or the world when they seem slippery and untrustworthy?” he writes. “What new perspectives and sensibilities might open up during this formative period?”
The perspectives and sensibilities of a poet, it seems. Someone with a more sensitive, complicated relationship to language than most of the rest of us have.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
By David Graeber and David Wengrow
Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were created over a period of 15,000 years, between around 25,000 and 15,000 BC. Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during this period. We have no way of knowing what most of them were.
This is of little consequence to most people, since most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history anyway. They don’t have much reason to. Insofar as the question comes up at all, it’s usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other so badly—the reasons for war, greed, exploitation, systematic indifference to others’ suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?
Perhaps the aspect of the opening to this fascinating, readable, mind-altering account of how human beings have in the past—and might in the future—organize themselves into different social structures is its insistent reminder that we know very little about our own history. Anthropologist Graeber and archeologist Wengrow are honest and clear about the limits of their own knowledge: “irreparably lost to us”; “next to no idea what was happening”; “no way of knowing what most of them were.” This is very different from the openings of most other books about the broad sweep of human history.
If paragraph one is about clarifying how much about history we don’t know, paragraph two zeros in on one of the major themes of the book: Were people always terrible to one another, or did we used to be better until something bad happened?
This question turns out to be a starting point leading to the more interesting and compelling one Graeber and Wengrow spend much of the rest of the book exploring: How did 17th-century encounters between European colonists and Native American social thinkers influence the Enlightenment, leading to many of the ideas of freedom handed down to us? And: How can a deeper understanding of what happened back then lead to more useful ways to think about “freedom,” which could help us reshape society for the better?
I learned more about Indigenous America in this book than I’ve learned over the whole 60 years of my life till now: about different tribal structures and traditions, about individual thinkers and leaders, and about how consciously and thoughtfully various Native American societies organized themselves. One of the important threads is how hard it is for many of us to conceive of our human forebearers—whether Iroquois in 1680 or Stone Age foragers in Europe 15,000 years ago—as fully sentient, reasoning people like ourselves.
This book made me look long and hard at many of my own prejudices and preconceptions about the humans who came before us. I don’t think I’ll ever look at history—or humanity—in the same way again.
To receive this newsletter in your inbox, please sign up here.