Roaming & Reading Issue 6  February 12th 2023

Read to Roam Book for February

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

I've been breathing in the salt brine, listening for the rustle of olive tree leaves and warming to the sun of an island nation as I've spent the last month immersed in books about ancient Greece.

The reading list for April's Myths & Mysteries of Greece adventure is a blend of classical myths and fresh, contemporary stories based on those myths & legends.

One of the novels that I can't wait to talk about with my fellow travelers (over evening cocktails) is Natalie Haynes' "A Thousand Ships." It's a re-imagining of the Trojan War with the women who fought it, endured it, and lost loved ones to it at the center of the story.

Narrated by the muse Calliope (not Homer!) she tells us: "If Homer truly wants to understand the nature of the epic story I am letting him compose, he needs to accept that the casualties of war aren't just the ones who die."

As husbands and sons (and brave Amazon women) take their places on the battlefield, we witness the terrible toll that's visited on the mothers and daughters and sisters of Troy. "I have picked up the old stories," Calliope reminds us, "and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight."

And those women spin their tales for us with wit and imagination. We meet goddesses, princesses and Penthesilea, the courageous leader of a band of women warriors who rides a "tall grey mare with a vicious bite" and prepares for her fate in combat against Achilles.

Haynes, a standup comedian and host of the BBC's "Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics" writes in the Afterword that there was great satisfaction in restoring the women who'd been marginalized in the ancient Greek myths to their rightful place.

"I hope at the end of this book, my attempt to write an epic, readers might feel that heroism is something that can reside in all of us..."

Chicks-Only Cuba!

I'm so excited about this trip that I just have to give you a little teaser! I'm creating a hiking, kayaking and reading trip to Cuba for women only.

The outfitter I'm working with has come up with a delightfully custom itinerary that includes walks through some of Cuba's pristine forests, hikes in national parks, a half-day of kayaking on turquoise waters, and I'm adding an extension for Havana because the art and history in Havana is FANTASTIC!

This trip is for Sirens only. (Beloveds can come next time!) Target dates: Spring 2024. And I'm keeping it small. Share the news & tell your friends and shoot me an email if you're game to go!

Reader's Road Trip

I'm working (far too slowly!) on a project about destination bookstores in the Midwest and Linzi Murray's brand new Reading in Public in West Des Moines, Iowa is a must-see.

Opened just last month Murray says that although she's loved books forever, she wasn't a natural for the bookselling biz.

“I was asking myself, can I do this? Am I even capable of opening a bookstore? I know nothing about business. I have actively never wanted to own a business. I don’t like math, I don’t know numbers, I don’t know how to manage people.”

And yet, this felt like a calling for Murray. Raised in Shawnee Kansas, Murray went to college at Drake for graphic design. As she and her husband weathered the lockdown in Brooklyn, she began organizing open-air meetups with book lovers, where they’d exchange titles and recommend favorites to one another.

Murray confides that she was trying to replicate the peace and sense of homecoming she experienced when she walked into her favorite bookstores in New York City.

–Which is why you’ll find elements of those Gotham stores on 5th street in West Des Moines. Murray leveraged her experience in graphic design to choose the materials and and the colors for Reading in Public.

Her favorite place in the store are the built-in book nooks. “They were my original idea,” she says. “When I was planning the store the words I was using were wander and gather. It was important to me that people felt like they could stay.”

Ramble in and you’ll find titles in multiple languages side by side on the shelves, a variety of books on neurodiversity and a robust section on grief. “Grief and the discussion of grief is really important to me,” she says.

Murray, who was adopted from China, endured the death of her father when she was in college. But she believes that readers can connect over grief in some unexpected ways.

“I have a grief book club,” she says, “but we don’t read sad books about losing someone. We read “The Dead Romantics,” so playing with grief makes it less isolating.”

To read more about my Reader's Road Trip series, subscribe to The Thread at MPR. https://www.mprnews.org/newsletters

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