BOOKPATHS

San Francisco (and, of course, Paris)

There are a number of excellent exhibitions at Northern California museums currently, including The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. You can easily visit one museum in the morning, stop for lunch, and then walk a couple of blocks to the other museum in the afternoon. While the SFMOMA exhibition is broader in scope, focusing not only on Gertrude Stein, but on her brothers and fellow collectors, Leo and Michael, along with the artists they championed during “the birth of modern art;” the Contemporary Jewish Museum focuses primarily on Gertrude Stein, following her “life from the end of World War I through World War II,“ “illuminating her pivotal role in art during the 20th century.” By day’s end, you’ll feel both exhilarated by the masterpieces you’ve seen and awed by the foresight, intelligence, and creativity of the Stein family. These are exhibitions you’ll carry with you.

Whether you are able to attend the exhibitions or not, both catalogs are well worth their hefty prices.

World

The extremely wise Rebecca Solnit writes about the care and feeding of hope.

Hope, on the other hand, is based on uncertainty, on the much more realistic premise that we don’t know what will happen next.  The next thing up might be as terrible as a giant tsunami smashing 100 miles of coastal communities or as marvelous as a new species of butterfly being discovered (as happened recently in Northern Ireland). When it comes to the worst we face, nature itself has resilience, surprises, and unpredictabilities. But the real territory for hope isn’t nature; it’s the possibilities we possess for acting, changing, mattering -- including when it comes to nature.

Los Angeles, California

Read Carolyn Kellogg's July 17th birthday tribute to Raymond Chandler, "one of Los Angeles' greatest writers."

Chandler is known for his novels, all featuring hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe. Marlowe saw a city full of both beauty and betrayal, and to survive he followed his own moral code: He lied to cops, took beatings from bad guys and regularly got and/or rejected the most beautiful woman in the room. Chandler wrote with the bitterness of a brokenhearted romantic: tough yet ready to fall in love again. His prose was indelible.

Edinburgh, Scotland

Brian Donaldson offers "10 of the best literary haunts in Edinburgh."

Brattleboro, Vermont

Author Archer Mayor talks about his "Brattleboro-based Joe Gunther detective series."

Even in beautiful Vermont, Archer Mayor finds shadows among the lush low mountains and pretty little towns, and his detective, Joe Gunther, finds a way to beat them back.