What We're Reading This Week
On the road again (photo from New York Amish: Life in the Plain Communities of the Empire State, By Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, Cornell University Press).
Dear Wags,
Last weekend, my husband and I nearly collided with a haywagon as we barreled down a rural highway in upstate New York. Since the 1980s, Amish people from the conservative Byler sect have relocated from their Pennsylvania heartland to the Mohawk Valley, where there is abundant farmland.
My husband, who was behind the wheel, swerved around the lumbering horsedrawn cart, passing a straw-hatted drover as he prodded a sturdy pair of horses around a bend. It was as if we had taken a bypass into another time.
A lot of contemporary Americans romanticize the Amish. They became a tourist draw for rejecting modern conveniences and keeping things plain. Up close, their world is messier. One human being’s rural idyll is another’s stifling cult.
What we project on another community says as much about us as it does about them. How nice it would be to trade Zoom meetings for a barn-raising, or ditch Instagram forever and put up winter preserves! That’s a fantasy. Most of us couldn’t hack the culture shift, and the same is true for the Amish.
We all know about rumspringa — the period when adolescent members of old-order Anabaptist sects try the temptations of the outside world. That rite of passage ends with adult baptism or the decision to leave a close-knit community behind.
Most young Amish return. Family and tradition exert a magnetic pull. Cut ties and the past tails you like a mournful ghost. Are outsiders drawn to the Amish because their culture is so different from ours? Perhaps they remind us of ancestors abandoned long ago. No matter how modern we become, we feel the tug of the old ways.
I don’t have a photo of that haywagon. The Amish prefer not to be photographed—nobody wants to be a roadside attraction. They go about their lives as they always have, at an ancient pace, knowing off-ramps were there to be chosen. Meanwhile, we race toward an uncertain future, feeling a twinge of recognition as we whiz past old-fashioned cousins. Somehow, the highway is broad enough to hold us all.
Yours ever,
BKP
What Time the Sexton’s Spade Doth Rust by Alan Bradley
Bradley’s kid detective, Flavia de Luce, returns to solve another mystery in post-World War II Britain. If you are new to this impish sleuth, she’s an orphaned aristocrat with a nose for clues. Left to her own devices after her parents’ deaths, Flavia looks after her insufferable younger cousin Undine while bringing murderers to justice. This time out, Major Greyleigh, a former hangman, keels over after consuming an omelet stuffed with lethal mushrooms. The prime suspect is the de Luce family cook, Mrs. Mullet. Never fear, Flavia will sort this out.
Death at the Sanatorium by Ragnar Jónasson
Translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb, this cold-case murder mystery owes plenty to Agatha Christie and her penchant for red herrings. An old nurse is found murdered at a remote sanatorium, and Detective Hulda Hermannsdottir is put on the case. There are five original suspects, but when one of them appears to die by suicide, the crime is considered solved. Thirty years later, grad student Helgi Reykdal starts asking the most inconvenient questions. Be prepared for plenty of twists.
