Posted 10:41 a.m. Friday, April 18, 2025
Man of Leisure, Volume Two: Part Three
“Literature is a long game. There is no shame in living among the discarded.”—Hugo Hamilton, The Pages
This is a ghost story, though not in the traditional sense. There are no seances to be held, no tarot cards to be read, no campfires to be sat around. It’d be nice to say that this all took place on some dark and stormy night, but the only tempest was located within my frenzied spirit as I was rushed to the hospital that Saturday morning in August.
Weak, I sat idly in the wheelchair when I looked up at the smiling face of a nurse, his bright white teeth framed by his scruffy facial hair. He looked down at me, calmly reassuring me that everything was going to be fine.
“We know each other,” was all I could offer him as a response.
He chuckled pleasantly. “Yeah, we went to the same Tony Awards viewing party a year or two ago at Pete and Alex’s.”
And then he was gone, like a phantom. In his place were two doctors dispassionately debating whether to “take the leg or just the toes” as they stood, arms crossed, at the foot of my bed like I wasn’t there.
“I don’t care,” I offered in a low voice.
They said nothing to me. They just kept talking, kept debating. Maybe I was the ghost.
Surgery came and went. They had saved the leg; they had sacrificed the toes on my right foot. From the operating room, I ended up in a hospital room on the sixth floor. Sleeping proved to be an impossible task as nurses, aides, and doctors spent all day and night drifting into my room to check in on me.
“I just want to sleep,” I said at one point.
“You come to a hospital to heal,” a nurse told me. “You go home to rest.”
So, there I was, healing and not resting. That first night an aide came in to check my temperature, my blood sugar and take my temperature, I looked at her and her cherubic face and cascade of wavy blonde hair, I recognized her from another life.
“We worked together at JCPenney’s, didn’t we?” I asked as she took my blood sugar.
She stopped and stared at me, slightly startled. We had both seen a ghost.
“Sure did!” she said, peppy despite it being two in the morning. “Couldn’t do it anymore. I got out of there and came here.”
“Funny,” I told her. “I worked at the mall for 11 years, I figured I’d die there, just slumped over a cash register because the stress of old ladies finally took me down.”
She laughed. Then she vanished. Even ghosts have tight schedules.
Soon, my mother came to visit me. We mostly sat silently in the room, watching reruns of Columbo on the flat screen across from my hospital bed. On the ledge underneath it, a garden of sympathy had sprung up with flowers. My supervisor Mike had biked in 95-degree weather to personally deliver flowers from his garden. The rest of Murphy Library staff had chipped in for a lovely bouquet. My cousin Linda, who lived out on the East coast, managed to send an arrangement so beautiful in size and scope that I momentarily ceased to exist as nurses tended to comment on their beauty before even saying hello to me.
“Oh good,” I muttered to myself as the umpteenth medical professional breezed past my bed to take a whiff of the bouquets. “Upstaged by chrysanthemums.”
Then came another ghost. She was tall, with a graying pixie cut. She cleaned the room, made small talk with my mother. She, like everybody else, commented on the flowers, giving me little factoids about each while emptying the trash cans. She was kind. She was familiar.
The next day while tidying the bathroom, she asked me when I had graduated high school. 2001, I told her. She asked what high school I went to. Central, I replied while trying to decide what looked good for lunch on the menu.
She stuck her head out the bathroom and said, “Oh then you’d know my daughter.”
She didn’t even have to say her name. I already knew. Her presence was there in the room with us suddenly. All those old days of walking home from school together, the lunch periods spent eating donuts in front of Quillin’s, the 18th birthday party I had my very first sips of alcohol as we gallivanted down Mormon Coulee Road. The summer afternoons where I would bike past their house and would talk to this very woman as she tended to her garden while I waited to hang out with her daughter.
We soon caught up on our lives as she finished tidying. Then, she was gone. And soon I would be gone too, moved from the sixth floor to the third floor for rehabilitation, a spirit on the move.
Periodically someone would come and take my blood and one such morning a woman with a distinct, Midwest, gravelly voice came in. I felt a calm wash over me. I asked her first name. Nothing clicked. Then I asked her last name. Still nothing. Then as she was preparing to take my blood, I looked at her and asked if she had a son and before I could fully get his name out, she halted what she was doing.
She grabbed my hands and shrieked, “Athel!”
It is my middle name. I went by it exclusively when I was little to differentiate myself from my father who is also named Jonathan. I stopped sometime in elementary when I collapsed under the weight of being called “Ethel” became too much.
The last time we had seen each other I had just graduated from college some 20 years ago. So many things had changed for us both. So many things had also remained the same. She still lived in the same house, now owned a bar where her son, my former partner-in-crime, was a bartender at. We laughed. We hugged. We parted, two spirits set adrift.
This is my ghost story. I know what you’re thinking, reader. Those aren’t ghosts. Those are just people you knew, there’s nothing other worldly about nostalgia. And maybe that’s a fair assessment. But maybe, just maybe, nostalgia is just a ghost you’re on friendly terms with.
21. The Final Revival of Opal and Nev by Dawnie Walton
Synopsis: A music journalist seeks to find out the truth about life and culture while interviewing an enigmatic duo, Opal and Nev, as they reunite for a concert, only if the ghosts of the past don’t tear it all apart first.
Review: If you handed me this book and told me it was non-fiction, I would believe you without question. That is just how lived-in the characters feel, how grounded the situations come across. Not all that dissimilar from the faux oral history as a novel loosely inspired by real people novel Daisy Jones and the Six, The Final Revival of Opal and Nev explores a lot of similar themes of fame, money, music, authenticity but does so in a text brimming with rich characterization, a nifty trick for a book with a seemingly endless number of characters telling their story. What may feel overwhelming at first as the story jumps around from perspectives, the writing never gets convoluted and instead each added perspective illuminates the situation. The highest praise for this book I can give it is that by mid-book I could identify whoever was narrating without seeing any attribution, that’s how richly drawn each person is in it. Highly recommended.
22. Study For Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
Synopsis: A woman struggles with being ostracized after she moves into a community and strange occurrences start being blamed on her presence.
Review: It’s not often I put down a book, sit back in my chair and wonder out loud, “Wait, did anything actually happen?” Study For Obedience can feel like a novel of nothingness as it’s more atmospheric than it is concerned with a hard-driving narrative. It is that exact ephemeral quality that makes it such an intoxicating read as the story sneaks up on you, word by word, paragraph by paragraph.
23. Too Late by Colleen Hoover
Synopsis: A college student falls in love with an undercover police officer investigating her boyfriend who runs a collegiate drug ring.
Review: A fever dream of a novel that answers the question (posed by no one, I might add) of what would happen if a Lifetime TV movie and 21 Jump Street were co-authors of a novel. Distinctly filled with more violence (sexual and otherwise) and drugs than your standard Colleen Hoover fare, it does still have all the benchmarks of a Colleen Hoover novel: female lead with a quirky name (Sloan) with a tragic backstory (drug addicted mother ill-equipped to raise Sloan and her neurodivergent brother), a tragic present (in an abusive relationship with a drug dealer named Asa), and a bland romantic lead who will help heal those both (an undercover police officer pretending to be a college student to infiltrate the college drug ring). This was an absolute dumpster fire of a novel that I could not put down. 10/10. No notes.
24. A Book of Days by Patti Smith
Synopsis: Rock icon Patti Smith lets us into her world, one day at a time, in this mix of photography book and memoir.
Review: Imagine you’re at your grandmother's house, and she pulls out her scrapbook/photo album for you to look through together and reminisce about all her misadventures around the world. Now, imagine if your grandma was one of the coolest, most influential people in rock and roll history. That’s this book. Patti Smith is an icon in her own right and a lot of the fun of this book comes from the casual way Smith writes about her experiences because she never telegraphs her reputation. And why would she? A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words.
25. Death’s Door: True Tales of Tragedy, Mystery, and Bravery from the Great Lakes’ Most Dangerous Waters by Barbara M. Joose, Renee Graef (illustrator)
Synopsis: A nonfiction picture book detailing various myths and true stories related to a section of water known as Death’s Door that links Green Bay and Lake Michigan.
Review: A smartly executed book that uses its beautiful illustrations to be incredibly informative.
26. Book Lovers by Emily Henry
Synopsis: A literary agent resists the temptation of falling in love with a stuffy book editor while visiting an idyllic town with her pregnant sister.
Review: Is Book Lovers the Scream of romantic comedies? Just like how the Wes Craven film rewrote the rules of slashers with its meta-commentary on the genre, Book Lovers aims to be a rom-com that lets the reader know its keenly aware of all the tropes of the rom-com genre. Chapter after chapter makes references to the various conventions of the genre, but it unfortunately doesn’t do a whole lot to subvert those very conventions. But even if it doesn’t upend the genre, Emily Henry has a gift at writing lovable characters you want to spend time with.
27. What You Are Looking For is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama, Alison Watts (translator)
Synopsis: A librarian helps library patrons find the books they want but also gives them the books that they truly need to chart new journeys in their lives.
Review: I know that this charming book is classified as magical realism by some readers. As someone who has worked at Murphy Library for several years, I can tell you that a librarian sensing what a patron intrinsically needs is not some magic trick. It’s just part of the job. The novel is filled with beautiful vignettes that manages to consistently challenge what you think is going to happen. A poetic, thoughtful read.
28. What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World by Taylor Mali
Synopsis: A nonfiction book discussing the trials and tribulations of being a teacher in America, inspired by Mali’s viral poem.
Review: Being a teacher is like being the human equivalent of a Swiss Army knife, always being called on to do a variety of tasks at a moment’s notice. In this stirring book, Mali details all the joys that teaching can bring and all the hardships that come along with it. A highly recommended read for students who are going to be entering the teaching field.
29. Bewilderment by Richard Powers
Synopsis: Set in a dystopian near future, a widower gets his son involved with a scientific experiment that will help his emotional problems.
Review: Classic novel Flowers for Algernon meets father/son melodrama in this great novel that details the lengths a father goes to help a son with behavioral issues and a very real fear of the collapse of the world. Your enjoyment of the novel might be affected by if you ever read Flowers for Algernon in middle school as that knowledge (and the direct references made to it in the book) telegraphs a lot of the story beats. That aside, I found myself deeply engrossed in the central relationship with the father/son, especially when their lives are upended by the son’s rise to prominence. The novel is at its best in the quiet moments between the two.
30. The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
Synopsis: A science fiction novel follows what happens when a Facebook-esque company comes up with a technology that allows people to upload their memories for all to see.
Review: The way social media has altered our society, our day to day lives, even our brains has been a rich subject for writers for many years and sees no signs of slowing down. So, what about The Candy House? How does it stack up? Well, I have to say, I really don’t know. I know that feels like a cop-out. “Tell us what you think,” I can hear you shouting. I truly don’t know what to make of this book. It’s equally thrilling and frustrating in the way each section experiments with different narrative forms that can be discombobulating for a reader. In two summers, this is the one book I would need to read again to know where I land at with it.
Edited to add: That’s exactly what I did. Reading the book again, knowing the way the book shifts format and perspective, made it a far more enjoyable experience as it was easier to follow the thing as a collective work. That’s the joy of reading and rereading. Your experience of a book is never static as you are always growing and evolving.
Want more "Man of Leisure"?
Volume One, Column One: Once Upon a Time...
Volume One, Column Two: Life, Death and the Pages In-Between
Volume One, Column Three: The Summer I Turned Pretty Sober
Volume One, Column Four: (101) Books of Summer
Volume One, Column Five: Ever After
Volume Two, Part One: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Reader
Volume Two, Part Two: The Good Book