Well crap. (And I say with all the love and affection in the world. I'm really going to miss Endicott Studio.)

Cuban author Leonardo Padura is profiled in the The Independent. Padura is one of my favorite authors and they way he writes about Cuba - in all its good and badness - is beautiful. I especially recommend Adios, Hemingway which I reviewed a few years ago. Here's a bit from the profile about his protagonist, Mario Conde:

Conde is not really a macho character: he's sensitive, a great reader, not interested in power over others. I wonder why "the Count" had become a policeman in the first place. "'Conde is not the guy to be a policeman," his creator agrees. "He is soft. But in the beginning, when I was writing Havana Blue, you couldn't have a character who carried out detective-style investigation in Cuba unless he was a policeman. In each novel, Conde distances himself further from the esprit de corps and discipline of the police. In the next novel, he will become a dealer in second-hand books, similar intellectually to the work of a policeman, but with more sensitivity." In the Nineties, there was a major crisis in Cuba because of the withdrawal of Russian aid, and book-dealing "became a very important business, because many people sold their libraries".

Gerald Durrell's enduring legacy lives on.

NPR has summer recommendations from indy booksellers. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows is one that I want to check out. (Sarah already gave this one some love a couple of months ago.) (And yes, that is the same Annie Barrows of the Ivy & Bean stories.)

I read The Legend of Colton H. Bryant expecting a book about the environment - or at least the damage to the west by oil drilling but what I found was an amazing book about class in America. This is working class as it truly means - working at a hard job where you are not compensated enough merely because the people doing the work have been led to believed (by generations of this life) that they deserve only a certain compensation. And the companies take gross advantage. It's a modern day cowboy story in some respects - in that Colton was very much a cowboy who loved WY and was doing the job he could to stay there - and the job that paid the most to stay there. But still, he wasn't paid nearly enough. It's a really beautifully told story - in the creative nonfiction vein - and extremely heartfelt. Calling Colton's death an American tragedy seems overblown perhaps, but it is certainly true and was certainly preventable. More on this one in my big August feature.

I have about ten other books waiting to be reviewed - but none of that happens until I get the next two chapters finished on Map of My Dead Pilots. I've been reading Joyce Carol Oates's journals which are fascinating stuff. I'm not a devoted fan of her writing - some I like, some I don't, but her thoughts on writing make for interesting reading. I also finished what ended up being a longer chapter on sled dogs than I anticipated (with references to Scott, Shackleton and others) and have been reading Barry Lopez on the mythic landscape to better explain how pilots could get lost in Alaska and how much of the map they have to have memorized to do the job. This one is called "Ghost Roads"; it's not the story of lost pilots but lost pathways. Everyone I know got lost up there at least once; most were perfectly fine but it was a constant reminder of how the ground could change when you weren't watching and how you could never let your guard down.