Meet me at the museum

Meet me at the museum / Anne Youngson, read by Helen Lloyd and Lars Knudsen, 272 pgs.

I can certainly agree with what Linda says in her review...this is a lovely book.  Tina Hopgood's best friend has died and she is dealing with her grief.  She ends up in a pen pal situation with a museum curator who responds to a letter she writes to an author who wrote a book on the discovery of "Tollund Man," a body that was discovered very intact in a bog.  Tina and her friend had intended to visit.  The curator who responds to her letter tells her that the author died several years ago but attempts to answer her questions.  From there, letters go back and forth and they share information about their lives, their thoughts and their families.  The relationship is great in that it is two people who are getting to know each other.  They are not looking for a hook up, they are mature adults who find something in each other that had been missing.  Wonderfully narrated so if you enjoy audio, I would recommend highly giving it a listen.  If you don't listen to audio, don't miss the book.

Meet me at the museum, by Anne Youngson

A charming epistolary novel in the manner of 84 Charing Cross Road and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  Tina Hopgood, a British woman in late middle age, writes to the Aarhus Museum in Denmark where the “Tollund Man” is on display.  P. V. Glob wrote a book called The bog people in 1969 about this amazingly well-preserved Fourth Century BCE specimen and his milieu and she hopes he is still at the museum and can answer a few questions.  They are rather existential questions, having to do, among other things, with her and her best friend’s plans to visit the Tollund Man someday, which has been rendered impossible by her friend’s recent death.  A polite curator replies that Glob died in 1985, but he will try to answer her queries.  And so develops an increasingly intimate conversation between Anders Larsen, the curator, who recently lost his beloved, troubled wife, and Tina, wife of a stolid farmer who she married because she got pregnant at nineteen.  Her life has been full, and not without its pleasures, but it is clear that she is isolated geographically and emotionally and disappointed in more than just not having seen the Tollund Man.  This debut novel by a 70- year-old author gives hope to all late-bloomers.  Lovely book.  272 pp.

And Side By Side They Wander

And Side By Side They Wander by Molly Tanzer, 112 pages

In the very near future, humans have nearly destroyed the planet, without any real way to fix it. In came an alien race that offered technologies and other solutions to Earth's problems, and all they asked in return was to take some of the best art humans had to offer and display it a their vast treelike space station/museum. The aliens would, of course, give it all back once humans had sufficiently gotten their act together. Three hundred years after the art left earth, we've managed to meet the criteria the aliens laid out so that we can get our art back. But they don't want to give it back, and they've repeatedly put off any efforts at resolution. So what can we do but send some forgeries with a crew of clones, synthetic humans, and a pilot from a different alien race to steal the originals back?

This is billed as a science fiction heist novel (which is like catnip to me), but that's not quite right. Yes, there's a heist, but that's kind of in the background of the main character's musings on what makes something art, what make someone human, why real art is more valued than forgeries, and the nature of museums in general. (That super-helpful alien race sounds suspiciously like the British Empire from time to time) It's a decent book though, one that would be good for a book discussion as there are PLENTY of meaty topics shoved into a very short book.