And likely hell to you, O social butterflies…. Yet reading has the power to help us all keep our sanity while keeping our distance during COVID-19. Stay safe. Stay healthy. Cozy up in your favorite armchair. Go back in time, go forward into the future, go deep inside an author’s mind, meet exciting new people. Travel in a good book.

Practice, Practice, Practice: This Psychiatrist’s Life is available through Amazon, internet bookseller.

Reviews from the bedside stack:

Of course you should read my book: Practice, Practice, Practice: This Psychiatrist’s Life. Patient ambushes! Clinician pratfalls! Community curveballs!

The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi by Jacqueline Park

This thick, deeply researched historical novel of ideas is set in Renaissance Italy of the late 1400’s and early 1500’s. Grazia dei Rossi—female, Jewish and a scholar, all strikes against her given the time— navigates love and treachery, personal and impersonal, with a riveting cast of supporting characters against a complex historical backdrop of politics, religious intolerance and inviolable social rules. The story arc is both compelling and unpredictable. The philosophical, religious, and literary references are a delight, as is the writing. It’s got everything that makes a novel compulsively readable. I was very sorry to finish it.

As an inspiration bonus for those of us writing late in life, the author started researching and writing the book when she was 64 and published it at 72. At 90, she was hard at work on the last book of this trilogy. (She died at 93.)

The second book in the trilogy, The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi, features Grazia’s only son Danilo de Medigo and is set in Istanbul at the heart of the Ottoman Empire in the court of Suleiman the Magnificent. The third and last, Son of Two Fathers returns Jewish Danilo to Venice as the murderous anti-Semitism of the Catholic church and Inquisition spreads through Europe in the wake of the expulsion of Jews from Spain. These are enjoyable novels, with the same attention to historical detail, but they are conventional tales of adventure and romance from the male point of view. To be fair though, Danilo just cannot get away from powerful women, nor does he seem to want to.

Much of the fascination and depth of The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi stems from the primary protagonist being female. Her point of view and experiences immerse the reader in the constrictions and vulnerabilities that even the most privileged women lived with six hundred years ago. Things have improved a little since then. Then there are the many years Park spent on the book. Working on something over a long period of time gives a sense of richness that you can’t fake. Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Too Close To The Falls by Catherine Gildiner

When my friend Terry recommended this charming book to me, she said it was her favorite memoir of all time. That’s quite a statement from a voracious reader of memoirs. Well, her taste is impeccable and so is this book.

The author is a natural raconteur, a character and a half, smart as hell, and as a child, hyperactive. It’s 1952, her parents are at their wits’ end, and the pediatrician recommends she work full time at her father’s pharmacy, located one town over in “the honeymoon capital of Niagra Falls.” She’s four! Can you imagine? Her childhood adventures are many and remarkable, as are the people she has them with. She delivers medications for ten years throughout the Niagra Frontier in all weathers with Roy—he drives, she reads the maps and names on the bottles. She’s continuously in trouble with Mother Agnese from kindergarten to middle school. “Unfortunately, I seem to have been born a rationalist, and unlike my parents or others around me, had dexterity for the high jump, but not for the leap of faith.” In third grade she not only stops his physical abuse but gets even with the school sadist— “Anthony (named after the patron saint of lost objects) McDougall, the boy who was held back so many times he was mistaken for the janitor on parent-teacher night”—despite the nuns’ indifference and her parents’ ineffectualness. In fourth grade, she flies alone to LaGuardia Airport to represent western New York in a high jump competition and “billets” with a family in Harlem whose daughter is competing. Intrepid understates her.

Told with brio, humor and insight, the specificity of this amazing memoir makes it a perfect time capsule of small town, Catholic life in western New York during the 50’s and 60’s. Best of all, it is only the first of a trio. After the Falls and Coming Ashore take us with unquenched verve through the adventures of her darker teen and coming of age years during the turbulent 70’s.

Upstream, Selected Essays by Mary Oliver

This collection by the beloved poet is an extraordinary book exploring extraordinary things in an extraordinary way. It’s impossible to describe, so here’s a taste from the second essay, Of Power and Time.

“In creative work—creative work of all kinds—those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook—a different set of priorities. Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity….

…And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.... The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work—who is thus responsible to the work….

…It is 6 a.m. and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be…. My loyalty is to the inner vision whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.

There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”