Local historian and author Tom Mitchell grew up in the area. His ancestors trace back to Argyle in the 1840s. He is the author of such titles as “1919 Triple Homicide” and “A Murder in Monroe.”

Was reading a big part of your childhood?

My mother was a journalism major, so reading was something that everybody in our family did. My brother and my two sisters still are avid readers. I can’t remember when I didn’t know how to read. I read the Chip Hilton stories by an author by the name of Claire Bee, who was a basketball coach at Long Island University. And whatever the sport was, football, basketball — he played all sports and he was good at all of them. I went to St Victor’s school and that was their strong suit, reading and the languages.

What are you reading now?

Right now, I’m reading Michael Pollan’s “How To Change Your Mind.” I enjoyed his previous books about food, “Botany of Desire,” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” It’s a little different, but that’s what I’m reading right now.

“Dubuque’s Forgotten Cemetery: Excavating a 19th Century Burial Ground in a 21st Century City.” It’s by Robin M. Lillie, and Jennifer E. Mack. On a bluff in Dubuque a developer wanted to put some condominiums in and it was next to the cathedral. And everybody in Dubuque says, “Oh yeah, there used to be a cemetery there, but they moved all those graves out there.” And then the bulldozers got in there and before long they’re digging up bones. “Well, maybe they’re animal bones.” And so, they brought in these ladies, I think our state archeologists. And apparently in Iowa, you find bones, you call them. And turns out that there was over a thousand graves that hadn’t been moved and it had slipped the collective memory of Dubuque. They did the kind of study on what they could, to determine as much information they could from the bones, from the materials buried with the bodies. The buttons that would have survived, things like that. So, it’s a fascinating read if you’re interested in local history.

Another title is “Letters from The Boys: Wisconsin World War I Soldiers Write Home,” by Carrie A. Meyer. The newspapers that she studied or looked at for the letters that they wrote back home, I think were Monticello, Albany and Brooklyn. But my grandfather was in that war and so I had an interest in it. And I wrote a couple stories for the Historical Society Newsletter, more or less like this. Some of the letters he wrote home, but mostly it was his field notes and where the Company H was from, which was the Green County National Guard. They got folded into the Army, where they fought in France. So, it has local interest.

I’m also reading “A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction,” by Joel Greenberg. This came out a couple of years ago. The local connection is that he’s writing about the passenger pigeon, but he built on the research that was done, I don’t know, 75 years ago in Southern Wisconsin by a guy named A.W. Schorger. And what Schorger did is he would come to places like the Monroe Library and look at the newspapers on microfiche as early as you’d go back, 1840s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70’s, and in the spring, every year they would write about, “Passenger pigeons are back,” and “The hunters are out.”

Any favorite authors?

Philip K. Dick is one of my favorite writers of science fiction. I really liked his early stuff that he wrote in the ’40s and the ’50s and I started collecting all his Ace paperback books — they’re in my basement. I have a long list of Phillip K. Dick. Now a lot of his stuff is made into movies. It’s sort of an unusual thing that long after he’s dead, Hollywood has discovered him. So, when they make a movie now based on Phillip K. Dick’s work, often I’ll go back and read it just to say, “Oh yeah, that’s what that one was about.”

I also read Stanisław Lem. He was a mathematician, wrote some science fiction. One of the John McPhee books that set me off on a different tangent, he wrote “The Curve of Binding Energy,” about a physicist at Los Alamos. I think his name was Ted Taylor, and his thing was miniaturizing bombs instead of making the bigger, bigger, better bombs. But then I got interested in the Manhattan project and as you can imagine, there’s quite a lot of work by people who are actually there in the Manhattan project. And then I remember watching, after the Challenger exploded and they had those congressional hearings and Richard Feynman, the physicist was sitting at a table. These were televised hearings and he stole the show. He had an O ring and he put it in ice water and then fished it out with a spoon and said, this is what happened to the Challenger. It was a powerful moment.”

— Cover to Cover is provided by the Monroe Public Library and is published the fourth Wednesday of the month.