"My prescription for a modern house: first pick a good site. Pick that one at the most difficult site—pick a site no one wants—but pick one that has features making for character: trees, individuality, a fault of some kind in the realtor's mind."

— Frank Lloyd Wright, 1938
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Perhaps the most famous American home ever, Fallingwater was completed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939 for the Kauffman family as a summer home for three. He built it on land in a secluded glen near Bear Run, a river south of Pittsburgh, above a waterfall. This short photograph-rich book explores Wright's style and substance, what he called 'organic architecture' and gives a brief tour through the exterior and interior of the home and connected guest house. Fallingwater is now a UNESCO world heritage site and tourable year round. I grew up five hours away and attended university less than an hour away, yet haven't yet visited. I'm eager to change that now after getting a glimpse courtesy of Waggoner. [JG]
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​Fallingwater offered the Kauffman family what many of the architect's other works also do: 

• a shelter with a vista without and within; protection, but without "feeling cut off from nature"
• a sense of grounding; planes that fit with the site and give a sense of "repose" amidst undisturbed neighbors such as trees and rocks and waterways and other "revered ancestors"
• order through unity of man and nature
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"The corner-window is indicative of an idea conceived early in my work, that the box is a Fascist symbol, and the architecture of freedom and democracy needed something basically better than the box. So I started to destroy the box as a building. Well, the corner-window came in as all the comprehension that was ever given to that act of destruction of the box. The light now came in where it had never come before and vision went out. You had screens for walls instead of box walls—here the walls vanished as walls, the box vanished as a box." — FLW, 1953
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"I had a sudden terrible fleeting illusion that all great men were really stuffing underneath and that all great, brave faces were only wax for Time to melt."

— Dan Cresap, The Golden Sickle

Orphan Dan Cresap is in for the night of his life. Sleeping in the loft of the Golden Sickle, a tavern in post-Revolutionary War Virginia, he is awakened by his dead father's companion and then gifted a strange inheritance: a ring, a string, and a scribbled verse. They are clues to the treasure his father stole, killed for, and hid somewhere before hanging for the crime. Out of the night on the companion's coattails, skulking into the Golden Sickle comes a vengeful dwarf creature, Elisha, who wants the treasure and to kill the son of Jim Cresap personally. Dan must choose to run or followhis father's clues.

This coming-of-age adventure yarn felt like a nightmarish Treasure Island. The autumnal early-America landscape with its spooky woods and uncharted rivers are cast with a band of curious allies and villains: a British ex-soldier, half-frozen Indians, a devious wax-sculptor, perceptive blind girl, and deadly she-pirate. Grubb draws it all brilliantly with blunt, shiny prose that I've come to love: "He puffed a spell...stared at her in the fireshine...and grabbed her by the scruff of her neck like a pup." This is the third novel of Grubb's that I've had the pleasure of tracking down. His storytelling powers seem fit for "a time as lost and gone as this one would be," to use his character Dan Cresap's own summation toward the dark journey's end. Best enjoyed fireside during a thunderstorm with the window cracked. [JG]

Davis Grubb (1919-1980) is best known for his first novel The Night of the Hunter (1953), a dark fairy tale set in the Depression-era West Virginia. (It's one of my favorite novels of all time.) Two years later it was adapted for the screen by actor Charles Laughton's first and only directorial project, which stars Robert Mitchum as Preacher. 

​Davis Grubb went on to write nine other novels and three short story collections, most of which take place in small midwest towns similar to his home of Moundsville, West Virginia. "My earliest literary influences were the tales of the old men in my river town," Grubb claimed, citing the 200-year-lineage of his family in the Ohio Valley, but many of his stories also include fantastical and mystical elements, matched with a uniquely lyrical style. I've read A Tree Full of Stars, Twelve Tales of Suspense, and The Nighter of the Hunter now, and am looking forward in particular to reading his second novel, A Dream of Kings, as it follows a young boy's experience of the American Civil War. ​
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“These considerations lead me to believe that the first human interaction with extraterrestrial life will consist of contact with organisms similar to, if not identical to, earth bacteria or viruses. The consequences of such contact are disturbing when one recalls that 3 per cent of all earth bacteria are capable of exerting some deleterious effect upon man.”

​— Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain
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An American military space probe crashes twelve miles outside a sleepy Arizona town. Within hours, everyone is dead except an infant and a senior citizen. In response, U.S. officials mobilize Project Wildfire, a top-secret emergency protocol to handle deadly outbreaks. They summon a team of elite biophysicists and rush them into a five-level, atomic-warhead-laden lab in some undisclosed, underground location to study the bacteria found on the space probe. Time is ticking. Mark Kelly and the other three scientists must work to contain The Andromeda Strain—without contaminating the lab—or the world. Nukes are set to self-destruct as a fail-safe, but would that even be enough?

Inspired by the the protocol for oil spills in oceans and declassified military procedures for handling deadly disease outbreaks, Crichton's first techno-thriller(published 1969) is a relentlessly paced mystery that seems all too plausible in 2019. His calling card here as it was throughout his career was to stay within the realm of what was possible, or at least "what's not known to be impossible" and marry current, unconventional scientific ideas with a thrilling situation. Andromeda didn't quite sweep me up like his later works--Disclosure (explores sexual harassment where the woman is the aggressor), State of Fear (climate science vs. climate politics), Jurassic Park (bioengineering and chaos theory)—but it has so much of the author's instincts of how to get me to keep turning the page. [JG]
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Michael Crichton (1942-2008) remains the only writer to have a #1 book, movie, and TV show in the same year in the USA. His novels include Sphere, The Lost World, Eaters of the Dead, State of Fear, and Dragon Teeth among others. Collectively his works have sold over 200 million copies worldwide, translated into thirty-eight languages, and provided the basis for fifteen films. He was also the director of Westworld, The Great Train Robbery, and Looker. ​​Steven Spielberg, who adapted Crichton's Jurassic Park and The Lost World to the silver screen, called Crichton "The High King of High Concept" for his ability to create stories that grab an audience's imagination and keep them turning the page. Crichton appeared on The Charlie Rose Show several times in the '90s and early 2000s. I continue to enjoy those interviews as he discusses science, medicine, psychology, biology, and computers. Crichton strikes me as a deeply skeptical yet voraciously curious, private yet warm person.
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"There are millions of species of bacteria, and thousands of species of insects. There are only a few species of primates and only four of great apes. There is but one species of man."
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— Michael Crichton, on the odds of encountering complex extraterrestrial life 

"You don't conform to what she wants suddenly you're the enemy."
​— Luce Edgar
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The last movie I saw in theaters twice was The Dark Knight (2008). Luce broke the 11 year drought. This 2019 Sundance favorite features Octavia Spencer, Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, and the new and brilliant Kelvin Harrison Jr. In it, a black high school senior, Luce, unnerves his history teacher by writing a paper that calls for violence. It's complicated though. Luce is also valedictorian, track captain, and the teacher's favorite at his D.C. charter school, and the paper assignment was to assume the perspective of any political figure in history. And yet, Luce was adopted from a war torn country at the age of seven. He's seen violence. Maybe even participated in it. Then there's what the his history teacher found in his locker after searching it—a shared locker though. When I found out Luce was first a play, I picked it up for $14 from Samuel French and finished it in one sitting. 

The play's story is even more condensed and clear as to the motives of everyone involved—student, peers, teacher, parents—but I greatly appreciated the film's decision to add or expand characters, characterization, symbolism, and relevant cultural subtext. I would liken this play to sort of out-of-court-room drama, a modern-day, dark Doubt, or The Winslow Boy. Depending on your reasons or prejudices, perhaps even a retelling of Paradise Lost. One of the most gripping stories I've enjoyed in years. [JG]

"...Life was like baseball, filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches, a game in which even champions lost almost as much as they won, and even the best hitters were put out seventy percent of the time. Coyote was right to want to wipe it out, to call the whole sad thing on account of darkness."

— Michael Chabon, Summerland
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Maybe today, maybe three decades gone, you've had the pleasure of experiencing a sunrise of sunrises or a sunset of sunsets. You know the ones. They mark the start or end of a decision or insight or journey. They paint themselves large and bright on your memory's wall. Maybe for years, maybe forever you return to the view and the feeling. Within or beside that memory shine a constellation of others too: how it feels to have the wind's invisible hands snapping at your clothes as you push 90 MPH; the sight of asphalt racing to endlessly unfurl before you; snacking on some hard-chosen spoils of a dusty town's gas station; laughing out loud to a podcast which hits the funny bone between the ears, drawing the curious eyes of fellow travelers; inhaling that familiar, salty cologne of an ocean breeze and hastily rolling up windows to buffer yourself from that green, freshly-fertilized farmland; relishing the exotic tang of a morning coffee that pries back open your sleepy eyelids; the warm, sunken embrace of a strange hotel bed. All these feelings and others are usually bottled best by a summer road trip. Except, sometimes at least, the term road trip seems wrong. Quake trip makes more sense.

Tyler Cowen writes about "quake books," which I've certainly had my fair share of (from gentle tremors to Magnitude 8+), and traveling often has the same effect—it shakes me to my core. It reshapes my world, slightly or greatly, and compels me to rethink time spent, priorities, and progress. Earlier this summer, I took a 20-hour, 1000-mile drive up the Pacific Coast Highway from my home in Orange County to Bodega Bay, north of San Francisco, and back again. The destination was a wedding at The Secret Gardens, a redwood grove that made a perfect rendezvous point for old friends. We ate, laughed, danced; caught up on the past two years and reminisced about our times at Huckberry. I made new friends too. I called the lady goodnight who was unable to be there, herself settling into a Master's program across the world in the Netherlands. I returned the next morning solo to McWay Falls in Big Sur and the art colony, Carmel-by-the-Sea, two places she and I still love and spent our first weekend exploring together four years ago. I stopped into a favorite book store, River House, and picked up two books per usual. This time it was a fat, unabridged translation of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (The cashier looked at me in awe—or maybe fear—when I plopped the 1200+ page tome on the checkout counter) and Michael Chabon's Summerland. I'm hoping Dostoyevsky is one of those high-magnitude quakers. Chabon's was a gentler, welcoming nudge, and not at all less enjoyable or meaningful to me. 

Set on the fictional Clam Island in the Pac Northwest, worst-baseball-player-ever and twelve-year-old Ethan Feld, is thrust into an ancient and magical war—one decided by America's favorite past-time. In order to restore sunshine to Summerland, the western section of Clam Island beloved for it's always-sunny weather, Ethan must recruit a mythic team of werefoxes, giants, and humans to defeat Coyote in the World Series. His swing has got to improve though. The perennial easy-out, he'll have to consult the legendary baseball manual "How to Catch Smoke and Lightning" as well as dig deep in himself to save the world. This epic coming-of-age journey isn't just about the destination though. Chabon's style, which I also love in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, has a gentle, whimsical energy to it. His subtle observations of kids and adults (and kids connecting with adults), clever world-building elements that enhance rather than distract, and simply-stated themes made Summerland a large, bright, memorable quake book. Basking in the nostalgic escapism of Chabon up and down the Pacific, was much like experiencing a sunrise of sunrises. 

Love you, Trini. [JG]