North Coast Journal

PUBLISHER - JUNE 1996


Summer reading

by Judy Hodgson, Editor and Publisher


OK, admit it. Do you adjust your reading material in the summer to something, well, just a bit more lazy?

I honestly have tried to get started on A.S. Byatt's "Possessions" -- not because Time magazine called it one of the most significant books of the late 20th century, but because my middle daughter said, "Here, you should read this," and she's usually right about such things. Instead, I picked up and devoured an old Pat Conroy I found at the used-book store.

The reason I have been thinking about reading material is that one Journal reader called last month and -- in an agitated voice -- said, "Don't you read?"

He wasn't speaking about newspapers and magazines (yes, I read piles). He was talking about books. He was angry about my publishing a certain Ron Ross column and wanted me to drop everything immediately and read James Fallows' "Looking at the Sun."

(By the way, Fallows will present the Hadley Lecture at Humboldt State University this fall.)

Maybe by fall I'll get around to it. By then we will be knee-deep in serious topics -- schools, welfare reform and certainly politics. But this is summer. And we had summer in mind when we planned this edition of The Journal.

On the cover is the zany, irreverent artist Duane Flatmo. He is without a doubt Humboldt County's public artist No. 1. We have others who certainly are more famous in the art community (Morris Graves, Mel Schuler), but none whose style is as recognizable by the man on the street.

Where did he come from? How did he get here? What are those two nostrils doing on one side of that face? Read all about it.

Summer on the North Coast is also a time of picnics, parades, rodeos -- and Shakespeare? As a matter of fact, yes. The calendar of cultural events for July, including a new summer program sponsored by HSU's CenterArts, was plump enough to warrant its own story, "A dose of summer culture" . [Not available online]

For those of you still in need of a hard news fix this month, there is always the expanded news briefs section.

Let me know what you are reading this summer. And let me know what you think I should be reading this fall.


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