Literate Matters: New and familiar writers bring great reads to Festival of the Book
Certainly at this time in the season, some readers are busy working through summer book lists, which for me means getting ready for the Harbor Springs Festival of the Book in September.
Full disclosure — I serve on the festival board, but you don’t have to be as closely connected as I am to prepare for some great presenters.
For example, I somehow managed to put off Nathaniel Ian Miller’s “The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven” when it was first published. Admittedly, this was my mistake.
Turns out the many accolades showered on Miller are deserved. Sven’s voice rings true in equal measures loneliness and curiosity. Unable to expect himself “destined for greatness,” he heads toward the barren Arctic, put off by Stockholm’s “stench, the incessant noise, the human interaction.”
His many adventures and mishaps soon combine in a tale by turns disquieting but also affirming.
In addition to Miller’s novel, I’m also enjoying Will Sofrin’s “All Hands on Deck: A Modern-Day High Seas Adventure to the Far Side of the World,” a first person account of Sofrin’s sail on the Rose, a replica of an 18th-century British warship.
Aimed out of Newport, Rhode Island for the filming of director Peter Weir’s 2002 film “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” Rose would journey “through the Panama Canal and then onto the Galapagos to scout potential filming locations before docking in San Diego.” Sofrin, recently back from a European sailing adventure but with few prospects and nearly empty pockets, signs on as crew.
He admits, “The life of building boats or earning a living as a sailor was not something that I was born into,” the son of an HVAC installer and a school aide, though a high school class turned all that around when he apprenticed at the International Yacht Restoration School.
His stint at IYRS led to some sailing adventures, as well as a boat building career, building boats for Billy Joel, Estee Lauder and others. Sofrin is also a storyteller, as readers hang on while Rose bounces through storms, structural breakdowns, and more on her way first south, and then north along the coast to Mexico and back to the U.S.
Also on my current list of festival books is Michael Finkel’s “The Art Thief,” the story of Stephane Breitwieser and his girlfriend Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, who nicked more than 300 precious objects over an eight year European crime spree, enthralled mostly by “the exuberant European oil works that blossomed at the end of the Renaissance and the dawn of Baroque.” He’s not opposed to taking other works, however, when opportunity presents.
But Finkle’s portrait of the thief, much as he did with Christopher Knight in 2017’s “The Stranger in the Woods,” is an examination of psychology as much as criminality. Breitwieser, questioned more than once by psychologists, is found “to be narcissistic and obsessional, unable to properly handle frustration, but also particularly sensitive and vulnerable,” say the medical professionals. Finkel’s conclusions paint the art thief as calculating and manipulative, though his failures are weighed against his desire to protect others, and his expectation that others will protect him.
What results is a character that cannot be neatly defined. Nor dismissed.
There are plenty of other books I also plan to read before September’s festival, including David James Duncan’s “Sun House” and Jenny Jackson’s “Pineapple Street,” as well as picture books and those for young adults, as well as a couple collections of poetry. The current list of presenters is available at hsfotb.org.
So whether you lean toward fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or picture books, there are plenty of titles to satisfy your preferences — and great presenters too — headed to this year’s Harbor Springs Festival of the Book.
Good reading.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Literate Matters: New and familiar writers bring great reads to Festival of the Book
