"Idyll Banter" by Chris Bohjalian

"Idyll Banter, Weekly Excursions To A Very Small Town" by Chris Bohjalian

Chris and his wife were "cab-napped" in March 1986 from Brooklyn, driven around for 45 minutes by an unusual cabbie who ignored traffic signals and stop signs. Around the midnight hour, the cabbie dumped them in an unknown neighborhood which was surrounded by police getting ready to raid a known area crack house. As Chris and his wife were lying on the ground to avoid bullets flying, he quietly suggests that possibly they might want to consider moving someplace in New England where these types of events would not be commonplace. Months later, leaving Brooklyn they move to Lincoln, Vermont - population at that time 975 - where, hopefully, life will be much easier on them........

"Idyll Banter" is a journal of small town life. Wonderfully insightful into the transition Chris and his wife made from Big City life to small town Lincoln...... from the telling of "Losing the Library"

" On a summer night in 1666, six years before she died, poet Anne Bradstreet watched her home in North Andover burn to the ground, taking with it one of the larger libraries in the New World. Publicly, at least, she approached its destruction with a combination of Puritan stoicism and faith, and bid farewell to the collection in a poem. Privately, was she somewhat less poised? I've always imagined she was, especially when she considered the ruination of all those books.

Lately, I've wondered as well how deeply her neighbors felt the loss of that library. I've envisioned them sifting through the black ashes in their black clothing and finding a chaffes spine from a book. A blistered cover. A flyleaf, singed along the edges.

This summer, my small Vermont village lost its library. A hill town of roughly a thousand people, Lincoln sits in a valley midway up one of Vermont's highest peaks, the 4,052-foot Mount Abraham."

The above is just a flavor of what Chris and his wife felt about losing their town library.

I hope that you will consider reading this delightful book by Chris.

Happy Reading!