My Journey in Writing, Ranting, and Woodworking

I like to read.  I like it a bunch.  Of late, I have been devouring books by Elmore Leonard.  I was told, by the guy at Murphy Books in Iowa City, that he was one of the best writers of dialogue alive.  He spoke the truth.  I like Murphy Books, they have a cat named Martha, who often helps me shop.  I carry her with me and when she starts purring, I assume we are close to some gems.  She has excellent taste in mysteries.  I could write an entire blog piece about the value of hiring cats to work in bookstores, but I won’t.  This is not that post.

This is the post where I write part one of my review of, ‘A Splintered History of Wood’, by Spike Carlsen.  I hadn’t planned on writing it in parts, but after two chapters, I was too excited to wait until the end of the book.  Imagine flipping to the first page, a page made from a wood product, and reading about our hero (Spike Carlsen), visiting a place in Wisconsin.  Not just any place in Wisconsin, but “Ashland, Wisconsin, home of the company which lays claim to selling the oldest workable wood on the planet.”  For a woodworker, reading these words is tantamount to starting a movie with a steamy scene involving Catherine Zeta Jones.  Nobody is walking out on that one.  You will read on.  A single piece of Kauri wood, fifty thousand  years old, measuring 20 feet by 5 1/ feet by 3 inches, is pictured on page 4.  It has zero knots!  That is a sexy piece of wood.

Now if you are like me, you are saying to yourself, “$15.99, 4 pages and a picture like that. Well worth it.”  But wait, there is more.  The book has 390 pages and I have gotten my money’s worth at page four.  Incredible!  I know it seems like I am grotesquely overhyping this book, but I am not.  It is truly a joy to read.  There is an interview with former President Jimmy Carter.  It is delightful.  The former commander in chief is an accomplished woodworker.  He even created a piece which was auctioned off for charity.  The price, 1 million dollars.  That is more than I get for my tiny boxes.  Mr. Carlsen takes a trip to the shop of famous woodworker Nakashima, and visits with his daughter.  She showed him their collection of wood, just waiting to be turned into furniture; 180,000 board feet of incredible pieces of wood.  I have 400 board feet, which is less.  We get to read about 3 blind woodworkers.  There is a section about carving with chain saws that makes me want to give it a try.  (Don’t worry mom, I won’t.)

In fact, there are so many wonderful stories, I want to share them with you, but I can’t.  Part of the fun of this book is the easy way he rolls from topic to topic.  It is the discovery.  Splintered is very well written and extremely difficult to put down.  At times though, there is a passage so interesting, so mind blowingly cool, that one needs to set the book down and just think about it.  This is how I felt when reading about the people who travel the globe collecting different species of wood.  One person, deep in the jungle, having retrieved a small piece for his collection, had to run for his life from millions of army ants.  Who knew there would be a chase scene?!

All of this and I am only through Chapter 2.  This is the reason I decided to write the review in parts, there is just too much good stuff for one review.  Of course, I don’t know what is in the rest of the book, so I am not going to rate it yet.  You will just have to come back and read the other reviews.