Field Guide: Books! Books! Books!

Hi! Happy weekend.

Growing up, the local library’s summer reading challenge worked me up into something of a spiritual fervor. I’ve always been competitive (with six siblings, you have to be) and the opportunity to read enough Scott O’Dell and Sharon Creech to blaze my way toward a $10 off Pizza Hut coupon was intoxicating—still is, frankly. Yesterday, I felt a flicker of that old thrill at the Durham Main Library, where I checked out Sally Mann’s Hold Still and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction.

(If extinction and election ennui have got you, quite reasonably, feeling down, here’s one sliver of good news: New York City libraries are finally getting their budget funding back! Horray libraries!)

All this to say: Editing the INDY Summer Reading Issue was a delight. While putting it together, this month, a distinct Southern Noir/Gothic theme quickly took shape: Take the shadowy online monsters in Lindsay Starck’s Monsters We Have Made, a novel set in Durham and deftly reviewed by Veronica Kavass, and the murder at the center of Bright and Tender Dark, a literary thriller by Carrboro’s Joanna Pearson, whom I profiled this issue, that’s set at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Initially, I wondered how to make such dark material appealing for casual summer perusal—though the closer I got to the material, the more light shone through the cracks: For Stephanie Clare Smith, author of Everywhere the Undrowned and interviewed by Fred Wasser, there’s something to be learned “from every single person’s survival story.” Smith would know: Deeply betrayed by all the adults in her life, as a child, the act of writing gave the Raleigh writer new freedom:

“If I was younger, it would be impossible for me to have my life so exposed. It’s the complete opposite to how I’ve lived. This was my story. I spent most of my life running from it. But I’ve gotten to a certain place where I feel like I’m looking for a place to land the plane.”

Predictably, Flannery O’Connor also makes a strong case for dark material: “Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction.”

Thanks for reading! Please do send me a note and let me know what you’re reading, this summer, and read on for more from this special issue and beyond.

elsewhere in the culture section

Checking books out from the library is easy; developing the discipline to finish them, in a world full of flashy attention bait, is harder. Silent Reading Clubs—”happy hours for introverts” in bookstores around the Triangle, including Letters in Durham, Blackbird Books and Coffee in Raleigh, and Flyleaf in Chapel Hill—are one social accountability measure. Learn more here!

The brilliant Diane Oliver, a 22-year-old MFA student from Charlotte who died in a motorcycle crash in 1966, offers much more than tragedy, writes Gabriel Bump: Her experimental work stands on its own, demonstrating “the joy of a young voice ripping across the page, undaunted.” And a review of Shae, Mesha Maren’s latest, a coming-of-age novel. (You can read our profile of Maren here.)

A one-stop online shop for local comics and zines.

A must-read interview with historian Scott Ellsworth about a sports history moment that you may not know about, but which took place in Durham—and celebrates eighty years this year.

Finally: a primer on the art exhibitions across the Triangle you can visit this summer.

out and about in the triangle

Governor Roy Cooper announced a new “North Carolina Music Office.” Carrboro’s cheese shop is expanding. Neighborhood Raleigh (a “Good Time Bar”) opened in the Smoky Hollow Development. A new pizza shop in Pittsboro. Upcoming events at the Carrboro ArtsCenter. Amazon teen romcom The Summer I Turned Pretty is filming at UNC (predictably, Reddit got the scoop on this one). The best “retro diner” in North Carolina. A new Ajja Market this weekend.

out and about in the world

I loved this Oxford American piece about composting in East Tarboro, NC, by UNC professor Danielle Purifoy and “In Search of Lost Lightning Bugs” (or “blue ghosts”) in the Times: “Artificial lights aren’t the only hazard that lightning bugs face. Habitat destruction, lawns cut too short, toxic garden chemicals, mosquito-eradication services, climate change — they all contribute to making the planet less hospitable to these magical creatures.”

— Sarah Edwards —
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