I’m going to suggest some books that relate both to Marian’s life and to her work.

The first book is really a series of books called “Dance to the Music of Time” by English author Anthony Powell (rhymes with Lowell). A twelve-volume cycle! I admit, I have only read the first one, but it was great. Powell’s  masterwork starts out in 1914, right at the outbreak of World War I, and follows the fortunes and misfortunes of a series of schoolboys, and continues on into the 1970s. It’s a devastating portrait of class-conscious English society; the long-gone rules it lived by, the division between the aristocracy and everyone else, and other strictures that were pretty much blown away by the cataclysm of World War II. As it did with Marian McPartland, the war changed everything for a lot of the English. Lots of serious misbehaving, and fascinating character sketches; probably the most fascinating is that of the boy Widmerpool, a schoolboy of mediocre talents who’s pretty much detested by his fellow students at boarding school, who goes to become a politician of ravening ambition. Friends and lovers meet, drift apart and then re-encounter one another in some of the most surprising places.

These books were made into a great four-part BBC television series that I actually did get to the end of.

Well, enough of England. Let’s hop back across the ocean to America, where the jazz was really happening.

One work of popular history that dovetails with the rise of jazz in this country is “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition” by Daniel Okrent. This 2010 book documents the exceedingly weird Prohibition era, when the government tried to ban a behavior practiced by a large percentage of the country – namely drinking alcohol.

What does this have to do with music? Plenty. Okrent quotes the writer Willa Cather, who commented on the way life changed in the 1920s – “Nobody stays at home anymore.” A good chunk of the population that didn’t stay home would up in speakeasies, illegal drinking establishments that people flocked to. As they drank, they wanted to dance and listen to music, either lives and on records, and that’s w here jazz came in. These joints provided employment and a venue for a lot of emerging jazz musicians. Though by the time Marian McPartland arrived in America, Prohibition was over, her hard-drinking husband Jimmy got plenty of work in the joints of Chicago, as well as a lot of “inns’ in the wilds of Wisconsin that ran on a similar combination of music and drinking. This topic comes up in two Ken Burns PBS series, both his “Jazz” multipart series and “Prohibition,” which is based in part on Okrent’s book.

One jazz biography not to miss is  the wonderful “Pops,” the 2009  biography of Louis Armstrong by Terry Teachout.

As you know from reading Marian McPartland’s biography, she and her husband Jimmy crossed paths with Armstrong, the great trumpeter and vocalists, many times over the years (as they did with so many other jazz greats).

“Pops” is one of the most readable music biographies ever. Armstrong literally revolutized music and was the first black entertainer many white Americans fully embraced. Armstrong took a lot of flack about this from fellow black musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, who were angry about segregation in this country and felt that Armstrong didn’t take a big enough stand.

Teachout gets to the core of Armstrong’s world view; he genuinely liked people, regardless of race. He was born and raised in multicultural New Orleans; he was an ebullient personality who, in his own way, dismantled a lot of racial barriers, intregrating both the airways and hotels in a very segregated era. He was, simply, loved, and that  had a powerful unifying influences for Americans.

Do I get to mention a television series here? I’m gonna. You can get Ken Burns’ great public television series “Jazz” on any streaming video service. As I was reading through Paul’s books I went back and viewed portions of Burns’ series. It was a multimedia experience, reading about all the jazz greats the McPartlands rubbed shoulders with, and then going back to the Burns programs and seeing their faces and hearing their music.

Finally, I want to mention a 2004 book that chronicles one of the true geniuses of jazz, “So What: The Life of Miles Davis” by John Szwed. Davis was unique in his genius, Like a lot of other jazz musicians, he was awash in contradictions; he was the son of middle class parents , but he embraced the hard life of a jazz musician, and had the same problems with drugs and alcohol that many jazz musicians struggled with, including Marian’s husband Jimmy McPartland. : Szwed writes that Davis  “he told every woman he became involved with that music always came first, before family, children, lovers, friends.” This book vividly illustrates that compulsion, whether you’re a listener, a musician or just an interested reader.

One book that also recounts how Indians fared before, during and after the American revolution is Maya Jasanoff’s tour de force: “Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World.” This 2011 book tells the story of Americans who remained loyal to Britain during the fight, and what happened to them afterward. To make a very long story short – they weren’t treated so well by the rebels, and many fled, dispersing throughout the world to other British colonies, leaving behind the way of life that they had put together in America – their homes, their families, their land. Some survived and thrived, others could never recover their losses.

Those loyalists included Joseph Brant, the Mohawk leader Frederick Hoxie writes about. Brant was a virtual adopted son of William Johnson, an influential  British bureaucrat who headed up Indian affairs in the northern U.S. and Canada.

Brant  had a military commission in the British Army – educated, well-spoken, Brant knocked the socks off when he visited England to lobby for his tribes’ rights. There’s a famous portrait of Brant dressed up in a plume of scarlet feathers, a tomahawk in his right hand, a crucifix glittering around his neck. The man knew how to make an impression!

Brant never stopped fighting for the Mohawks, both as a soldier and after the war as their leader – his group ultimately emigrated to Canada and established a new community in Ontario, called Brant’s Town (now called Brantford), located in Brant County. This group’s descendants are today a part of Canada’s Six Nations native group.

Alexander McGillivray, another character in “This Indian Country,” is also featured in Jasanoff’s book – this son of a Scottish father and an Indian mother also supported the British, and kept up the struggle to keep his tribe, the Creeks,  together after the war.

Next up is a book about an appalling chapter in this story – “Driven West: Andrew Jackson’s Trail of Tears to the Civil War” by A.J. Langguth. A lot of books have treated the story of the “Trail of Tears,” the forced evacuation of the Cherokees from Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama to the Oklahoma territory.  Like Hoxie,  Langguth portrays Andrew Jackson as the architect of this forced relocation. It, didn’t just rob the Cherokees of their ancestral land, much of which was rich agricultural and coveted by whites, but set them up for a long march where many were robbed of their remaining possessions, and many died.

Jackson broke a number of treaties to accomplish this; not the first white leader to do this, and certainly not the last. Langguth argues that the turning over of rich agricultural land in the Southeast ultimately strengthened the South’s hand in the Civil War.

Richard White, the great Western historian, also looks at this period of history in his book “The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815.” White has done a lot of writing and thinking on Indians and their role in the conquest and development of the American West. In this book, he writes about a period where whites, including the French and the English, and Indians living in the Great Lakes area (the “Old Northwest”),  actually lived side by side and accommodated each other in relative peace. Neither side tried to dominate each other. Eventually, Europeans of a different orientation moved in, and the peace dissolved, ending after the War of 1812.

We just had the great novelist Louise Erdrich on – she writes about Native Americans with  sensitivity and insight. I’d like to mention a  novelist I love, the great Native American writer James Welch. Welch, a Native American of Blackfeet (father) and Gros Ventre (mother) descent, wrote several wonderful novels, many treating the Indian experience as he makes his way in the white world.

One of my favorites is called “The Indian Lawyer.” It’s about Sylvester Yellow Calf, a prominent lawyer raised in poverty on Montana’s Blackfoot reservation. He has a seemingly limitless future and is considering a run for Congress –  until a disgruntled convict, denied parole by a parole board Sylvester serves on, sets out to destroy his career. This book is both an insightful portrayal of a talented Indian man making his way in the white man’s world, and a gripping suspense thriller.

Finally, I loved Welch’s last novel, “The Heartsong of Charging Elk.” This book’s main character is the ultimate outsider  – an Oglala Sioux who tours with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show in the late 1800s and gets left behind in Marseille. Welch’s gets beneath the skin of Charging Elk, a man of simplicity, sensitivity, courage and violence – all in the same complicated package.

Welch  was also adept at juggling styles – he could  combine plain-spoken realism with surrealistic accounts of the dreams and spirits that many of his characters rely on for guidance. We lost a great writer when Welch died in 2003 at the age of 62.

Dean Adams on "Well Read"

I enjoyed reading “Ten Thousand Hooks.” It’s fascinating how a little-known profession (Alaska commercial fishing) has achieved so much notoriety as the result of the show “The Deadliest Catch.”

I confess to watching more than one episode of this show. Maybe it’s because being on a storm-tossed boat in the middle of a cold ocean is my idea of, er, hell. That’s what reading is for – to take us places we have never gone before! I’ve spent my share of time in Alaska, though mostly on land, thank goodness, and I’d just like to echo this quote from the editor of the Alaska Fishermen’s Journal.

“Alaska, in a lot of ways, is another planet….There are things going on there that many people can’t quite comprehend, volcanoes, earthquakes and so many storms with hurricane winds they don’t even name them.”

Speaking of “The Deadliest Catch,” you can get the word from the star’s mouth with Sig Hansen’s memoir, “North by Northwestern: A Seafaring Family on Deadly Alaskan Waters.” Hansen, of course, is one of the featured fishermen on “The Deadliest Catch.” Written with the help of outdoor writer Mark Sundeen,  Hansen’s story vividly portrays the joys and hardships of crab fishing in the Bering Sea.

Like Dean Adams, Hansen comes from a Norwegian fishing family that plied its trade in an era before Gortex and GPS (Hansen says he still speaks Norwegian at home). The stress and drama inherent in this way of making a living loom large in this book as well – Hansen’s two brothers also have adopted this dangerous way of making a living. The family has endured its share of sinkings and rescues, as you will see if you dip into this gritty book.

Two more books devoted to Alaska fishing are novels: 1979’s “Highliners” and 2001’s “Breakers” by William McCloskey.  These books are interesting both for their portrayal of the stresses on fishermen and their families and for the changing economics of Alaska commercial fishing – like everything else, it’s become a more international occupation, as foreign fleets and foreign investment have become an increasingly influential force. I’ve read that these books, especially “Highliners,” are virtual bibles on Alaska fishing boats – one fishing lobbyist said that `Highliners’ is like a Bible in Alaska. “Check any 10 fishing boats up there and five will have a copy of it on board.”

Back to Alaska memoirs: I have heard good things about a book called “The Map of My Dead Pilots: The Dangerous Game of Flying in Alaska”by Colleen Mondor, who worked from 1993 to 1997  as a dispatch coordinator for an air transport company headquartered in Fairbanks, Alaska. You really have to have visited Alaska to get just how dependent the state is on air travel – it is so big and so cold, and much of the terrain is, shall we say, inhospitable.  This set-up tends to attract pilots with a certain aptitude for taking risks. Mondor tells the story of pilots, some living, some dead, who put their lives in  their hands to keep Alaskans connected.

Speaking of Fairbanks, a place I have visited and still think of as one of the strangest places on earth – it’s undeniably frigid, but at high summer, flowers and vegetables in Fairbanks grow to gigantic proportions.  I’d like to mention an Alaskan memoir that takes place mostly on land, and which was written by a woman who grew up in Alaska in its pre-statehood days  – “Two in the Far North” by Margaret Murie. She grew up in a log cabin near Fairbanks and lived a life on the frontier, tagging along on a cross-country dog-sled mail run over rivers that were breaking up. Murie married a young biologist n amed Olaus Murie, and together they spent the next fifty years exploring and mapping Alaska by dogsled, snowshoe, skis, boat, floatplane, sometimes with a baby in tow. The Muries would go on to become great forces for the conservation movement in Alaska. Mardy Murie’s love for the place shines through in this classic book.

Speaking of Fairbanks, the backcountry around Fairbanks (they call it “The Bush” in Alaska ) is the setting for one of the saddest and most compelling books I have ever read – “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer. Many people have heard of this book, in part because it was made into a movie directed by Sean Penn.  It is so beautifully written – it really gets into the heart and soul of an idealistic young man, a star scholar and athlete, who rejects modern life and eventually  made the decision to walk into the Alaskan wilderness to live a pure and natural life. Like many idealistic young men, he did not know what he was getting in to.

Finally, I’d like to mention an Alaska memoir that relies more on character than adventure – “If You Lived Here I’d Know Your Name: News from Small-Town Alaska” by Heather Lende. Lende’s memoir of life in Haines, Alaska, population 2,400, is informed in part by her work as obituary writer and social columnist for the local paper in Haines, a spot 90 miles north of Juneau with no stoplight and, as of 2005, when this book was published, no mail delivery. Fishing accidents, airplane crashes and Speedy Joe, a guy who never wore anything but a hat and a red union suit are all part of this affecting narrative.

Jasper Fford on the set of "Well Read"

Coming up with a list of books that are “like” Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series was a challenge, because I don’t think there really are any books just like them. They are unique, both in their construction of an alternate fantasy world and in their reliance on the ENTIRE FIELD OF ENGLISH LITERATURE to populate that world.

Well, here goes.

A digression –  Mr. Fforde also writes children’s books. He must be a child at heart anyway, so this strikes me as an appropriate match-up. Called the Dragonslayer series, these books concern a young woman named Jennifer Strange who runs an employment agency for wizards, who have fallen on hard times for reasons having to do with government regulation, and who are making ends meet with odd jobs like installing electrical circuits by telepathy. Needless to say, events don’t linger long in the home improvement field, but move on to something much bigger and darker.

Next up is a fantasy author whose works I really like, but whose vision is considerably darker than Mr. Fforde’s. That would be Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafon.  Zafon is an immensely imaginative, talented and productive guy –he writes children’s books, too – but I’m going to stick to three of his books which, like Fforde’s,  feature a fantasy world inhabited by books. At least I hope it’s imaginary, because there are some pretty scary characters in these books that I hope will remain between the covers.

The first, “The Shadow of the Wind,” concerns a young boy, Daniel Sempere, who lives in Barcelona right after the Second World War. Beneath the streets of Barcelona lies a fast underground cavern called The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which contains a huge library of obscure books maintained by those few initiated into the place. Once you’re initiated, you get to check out one book, and then you have to preserve it and protect it. Daniel selects a book called “The Shadow of the Wind” and becomes completely engrossed in its story, but he can’t find any other books that have been written by the same author. So he sets out to find him, and them. .

If Daniel had only checked out a cookbook, he would have led a much saner life, but he didn’t. In the process he discovers a heartbreaking love story, matches wits with a murderous police inspector, is introduced to the Devil himself and has a lot of adventures in the streets of Barcelona, which Zafon manages to portray as the scariest, most beautiful city ever. The love story/back story is set during the Spanish Civil War, and the Franco regime is the villain.

There are two more books in this trilogy. “The Angel’s Game,” and “The Prisoner of Heaven.”

“The Angel’s Game” is a prequel to “Shadow of the Wind” and concerns a young man, David Martin, who lives in the Barcelona of the 1920s.  Martin is a young writer, a very unhappy guy for a variety of reasons, who is approached by a Mysterious Stranger to write a book. My advice – if this ever happens to you, JUST SAY NO. The Cemetery of Forgotten Books plays a role. This book gets pretty action packed at time for a scaredy cat like me, but I still enjoyed it.

The third,  “The Prisoner of Heaven,” set in Barcelona in 1957, features the return of Daniel, who is now a young married man, working in his Barcelona bookshop. A strange figure with a limp walks in and says he wants to buy a copy of “The Count of Monte Cristo” and then writes a dedication inside, to ‘To Fermin Romero de Torres, who came back from the dead and who holds the key to the future’. Complications ensue!

Briefly, I would like to mention a couple of other authors who have created entire worlds for their books. The first is the great Terry Pratchett, author of the “Discworld” series. Pratchett has sold  about twenty five gazillion copies of these books world wide, and my younger son has read all of them. I had a little trouble with them, but I might not be smart enough to grasp all that’s going on here.

The Discworld is a flat disc balanced on the backs of four elephants which, in turn, stand on the back of a giant turtle. Pratchett populates the world with some remarkable and strange critters. Pratchett  takes his inspiration from and parodies other masters of fantasy and horror, including J.R.R. Tolkien and the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.

One of my favorite books of recent years, one I actually could understand,  is a wonderful novel called “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” by British author Susanna Clarke. This book is the story of two magicians in 19^th century England who are engaged in a professional battle for supremacy. But complications ensue, and they unite to save England from her enemies. This book is funny, scary and reintroduces the reader to a lot of elements of English folklore, including some very odd and scary fairies.

Finally, before I completely go off the rails pondering the inventiveness of all these authors’ imaginations, I want to mention one more fantasy for grownups that I think has stood the test of time – 1983’s “Winter’s Tale” by Mark Helprin.

This book features a hero, Peter Lake, who lives in a mythical version of New York City, in the early 20^th century. Peter, the child of immigrant parents, is denied admission to America at Governor’s Island and set adrift in a boat. Just like Moses, he is adopted by another tribe – the Baymen of Bayonne Marsh.

When he comes of age, the Baymen send him back to Manhattan, where he runs afoul of a criminal mastermind named Pearly Soames and is rescued by a mysterious white horse, a sort of guardian angel (the horse can fly, among other things). There’s also a story of true love. A lot of fantastic things happen in this novel, but like all great fantasy novelists, Helprin makes you believe.

Which brings me to that mysterious white horse – it reminded me of the white stag that guarded a young fellow named Harry Potter. Have you ever heard of those books? I hear they’re pretty good.

Louise Erdrich on "Well Read"

What a fascinating writer Louise Erdrich is, and how. I wish I had time to go back and reread all her books. She’s lyrical, insightful, and she knows how to build suspense. I pretty much destroyed my fingernails reading “The Round House.”

Here are some other facts about Louise Erdrich.  She’s of mixed parentage, including German American, American, French and Chippewa (grandfather). She’s an enrolled member of the Chippewa tribe, and most of her books are set  on Indian reservations in northern Minnesota and North Dakota, although many white characters walk on stage as well, as well as Indians from other tribes. She’s very straightforward about the hardships inflicted on Native Americans, but one critic noted that she’s “more interested in love and survival than in recrimination.”

She owns an independent bookstore! It’s in Minneapolis, and it’s called Birchbark Books.

In common with other authors, including some we’ve had on the program  – I’m thinking of Ivan Doig here – she will create characters in one book, set them in motion and then continue their story in another. Like Faulkner, a writer so many writers own a big debt to, she will sometimes tell her story through the eyes of multiple characters. This is tricky to pull off, because you have to adopt the perspective of each of a cast of characters and keep the reader believing in each one. Also like Doig, she braids together history  and contemporary times. Her characters all have very rich inner lives; you feel like you get under their skin.

She has written many books, including 14 novels, one story collection and seven children’s books. Since I’m on a short time leash here, I’m going to mention some of her more noteworthy novels:

Her breakout book, “Love Medicine”, was a 1984. publication. “Love Medicine” and four subsequent novels tell the stories of three interrelated families living in and around a North Dakota Indian reservation from 1912 through the 1980s.

The title comes from the Chippewa belief in love potions. The story begins with the death of a member of a Chippewa family member, a prostitute, then goes back in time to tell the story of Marie and Nestor, the grandparents of the family. Erdrich likes to jump back and forth in time, and some of this story jumps backward to tell the story of Marie’s unhappy experiences in a convent, including being burned by boiling water by a nun who is trying to exorcise a devil within her. As you know, burning, and sexual assault are also events in “The Round House,” and they are pivotal events in “Love Medicine” as well.  Magic is also a big part of Erdrich’s books, and a love potion does make an appearance, but it doesn’t necessarily have the desired effect. This book won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction – quite an achievement for a debut novel.

The next novel, 1986’s “The Beet Queen,” moves out from a sole focus on the Native American community to include whites, mostly German Americans, as well. Set in the Depression on a North Dakota reservation, “The Beet Queen” concerns three children, two young boys and a girl,  who are abandoned by their mother, and follows their life trajectories, mainly that of Marie, the sister.

I’m going to skip over her next couple of books and move on to 1994’s “The Bingo Palace.” This one involves a young man, the son of some characters from “Love Medicine”  who returns to the reservation after a not very successful foray into the white world and starts working at his uncle’s bingo parlor. Thanks to the magic that Erdrich sometimes employs, he finds wealth from his dead mother in the form of some winning bingo tickets. Why can’t real life be more like novels?  Seriously – Lipsa, the young man, eventually embarks on a quest to find his spiritual roots.

Erdrich’s 1999 novel, “The Antelope Wife,” the story of a woman dealing with several tragedies, had  many elements of magic realism, so much so that it won a World Fantasy award. Erdrich recently decided that this story needed revising, so she rewrote it, and published it in a new edition! It would be interesting to compare the before-and-after versions.

“The Last Report on the Miracles of Little No Horse,” her 2011 novel,  tells the story of a Catholic priest, Father Damien, and gives Erdrich the chance to write about how the Catholicism adopted by many Indians flowed together with their native spiritual believes. Father Damien has a pretty big secret, but you’ll have to read the book to find out.

Finally, I want to briefly mention 2008’s “A Plague of Doves,” a book that features some of the characters that return in “The Round House.”

Like “Love Medicine” it involves a young person, in this case a teenage girl, trying to puzzle out the mysteries behind some old history and a crime; in this case a lynching  of Indians that occurred after a white family was murdered in 1911. This novel features a character who will reappear in  “The Round House” – Mooshum, the grandfather of the main character in “The Round House”.  Evalina, the girl, recounts her attempt to puzzle out all the connections in her community: “I traced the blood history of the murders through my classmates and friends until I could draw out elaborate spiderwebs of lines and intersecting circles. I drew in pencil….”  Knowing that the chart was becoming so complicated she would end up revising it over and over.

“The Plague of Doves” tells all these intersecting stories – there’s suspense (who really murdered the family?), the story of many romantic connections among the characters, and an indelible portrait of a small community where everybody knows everybody’s history, going back a long, long way. Reading this book will set you up nicely to read “The Round House,” because you will know some things that readers new to Edrich’s books don’t, but “The Round House” can stand entirely on its own.