What to Read On Lake Michigan
1) <em>Out Stealing Horses</em>, by Per Petterson
Graywolf Press
amazon.com
$10.04
Out Stealing Horses begins at the end, when 67-year-old Trond Sander retreats to a placid lakeside cabin in eastern Norway, only to discover that his new neighbor is someone from his past. Memory sends him back to the summer that defined much of his life: the middle of 1948, when he was fifteen years old and lived in a cabin with his father during tree-felling season. Pinballing between past and present, Trond reflects on that fateful season, from the tragedy that befell his neighbor’s family to a series of disillusionments about his father. Haunted and spare, Out Stealing Horses is a bruising tale of fathers and sons, choices and consequences. Consume it on a lakeside porch with a tumbler of something brown.
2) <em>Housekeeping</em>, by Marilynne Robinson
Picador
amazon.com
$13.29
Fingerbone, Idaho, a lakeside town at the foot of snow-capped mountains, is a place “chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Here live Ruthie and Lucille, two orphaned girls left to grow up in a house their grandfather built, where a rotating series of relatives are charged with their care. In this strange and wild place, Robinson spins an enchanting tale about loneliness and loss. Told in lush, lyrical, downright biblical prose, Housekeeping is an American classic for a reason. Read it among the loon calls in the morning.
3) <em>Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes: Tragedies and Legacies from the Inland Seas</em>, by Anna Lardinois
Globe Pequot
amazon.com
$13.61
Ever since a French furrier’s ship disappeared on Lake Michigan in 1679, over 6000 vessels, large and small, have met their untimely ends on the Great Lakes. It’s estimated that over 30,000 mariners have lost their lives in these tragedies. Now their watery fates are maritime history, told with dignity and detail by a local historian. One deadly crash on Lake Ontario killed 119 vacationers and galvanized sweeping maritime safety reform; elsewhere, a mysterious collision between schooners on Lake Michigan left an estimated one thousand Milwaukee children orphaned. Deeply researched and grippingly told, these histories have grown into local legends.
4) <em>Surfacing</em>, by Margaret Atwood
Anchor
amazon.com
$15.95
Nothing good ever comes from a secret, and Surfacing opens with a whopper. Two couples head to a lakeside cabin for a relaxing getaway, but our unnamed narrator is hiding something: she’s brought her lover and friends here in a quest to find her father, long missing and presumed dead, whom she believes must be living nearby. During a strange week by the lake, our narrator mulls over her dark past and surfaces more than just details about her father’s disappearance. Part detective story and part psychological thriller, Surfacing is utterly absorbing and unputdownable. At the end, you’ll be checking under your fingernails for blood.
While you’re lounging on a lakeside porch, brush up on the history of Great Lakes shipwrecks, or get lost in a water-logged novel.