The Library Problem:

In March of 2006 my wife Mary and I owned about 3,500 books. We both have eclectic interests, voracious appetites for knowledge, and a great love of used bookstores. The problem was that we had no idea what books we had or where any of them were. We lost books all the time, cursed late into the night digging through piles for that one book we knew must be there, and even bought books only to find that we already owned them. There were books on random shelves, books on the floor, we were tripping over books when we walked up and down the stairs. In short, we had a mess.

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With plenty of moving help from Zack, Matt, Cliff, Justin, Jon, Will, and Karen, Bisson Tower went from empty to full quickly enough that we all had plenty of time to sit around and enjoy the lunch Sandee cooked up, then retire to the roof with cocktails.

The cats were traumatized by it all, but I’m happy to be done with construction and finally be able to enjoy the new place, with all its quirks.

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A friend of mine jokes that every conversation in Warren revolves around heat. But, it wouldn’t be funny if it wasn’t at least a little bit true. As it turns out, most of the rest of the country is talking about heat too.

Pellet stoves have been all the rage this fall. I feel lucky to have gotten one before the rush, but I’m also a little dismayed about the selection. Why (as usual) do Europeans get good looking pellet stoves like this, but no American manufacturer can do anything that looks like it was designed in the past two centuries.

But I shouldn’t complain. At least I got the pellet fuel I need, others may not be so lucky. New York state’s Consumer Protection Board issued a press release asking retailers to ration supplies to three tons per household., but an AP report quotes a retailer saying “there is not a shortage of pellets, there is a shortage of pellets getting to us in a timely fashion.”

And all of that makes for good conversation in Warren.

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Jake Halpern’s Braving Home (also in softcover) easily took my interest. Here’s how John Moe described it for Amazon.com:

As a cub reporter at The New Republic, Jake Halpern earned the unofficial job title of Bad Homes Correspondent. Braving Home tells his stories of places where people really ought not live and the people who live there anyway. Halpern traveled to such inadvisable destinations as a bed and breakfast at the foot of an active Hawaiian volcano, a North Carolina town trying to recover from being completely submerged, an indoor Alaskan city, and an island in the Gulf of Mexico located directly in the cross hairs of numerous hurricanes. And while the places themselves make for interesting historical lore, the people who choose to stay and make their homes there form the real heart of the story. The doomed, it seems, get few visitors but have plenty of time on their hands. So Halpern goes out to meet them, crashes on their couches or guest beds and hangs out for a few days forming a one-man tourist industry. Far from being the kooks one might expect, Halpern’s subjects come across as normal folks, though significantly more resilient than most, who stay in their homes simply because, well, those are their homes. Halpern himself figures prominently in most of the stories and at times it seems like the young man is spending too much time navel gazing. But on each of the book’s five adventures, Halpern goes from wide-eyed visitor to welcome member of the community and in so doing demonstrates how, once you get used to it, any place can feel like home. Even if that it’s surrounded by molten lava.

Halpern visits homes in Princeville North Carolina, Whittier Alaska, Kalapana Hawaii, Malibu California, and Grand Isle Louisiana. Some of the homemakers are following long held family traditions, others are intentionally isolating themselves in their inhospitable environments.

Despite my interest in Halpern’s concept, I found it to be a mixed read. He goes looking for some deeper meaning or significance in the way these people cling to their homes, but largely comes up empty. People, it would seem, do inexplicable things. There are times I wished told me more. In Alaska, for instance, he could have done more to explain what economic activity sustained Whittier today.

Update… here are two relevant Wikipedia articles about Hawaii: Kalapana Hawaii and Volcanoes National Park. The Times ran a story that mentioned the Lava Side Inn last week. It’s With Vulcan as My Landscaper in the June 30 2005 Home & Garden section. If I was cool I’d give you an OpenURL link for this.

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