Reading between my battle with the fruit flies - shoot I did it myself - had a sack of lemons about to turn in the frig and decided to use them as dish detergent and to clean my butcher block and open one as a frig deodorant and throw slices in with the laundry - well you guess it - and now that we are in the mid-nineties I turned up the AC a notch so the house is ripe - well the lemons are just going to have to do double duty as I find some more old jars that I half fill with water - float the cut lemon and a tad of sugar and a tad of dish-washing detergent - unfortunately the one jar had lemon on the outside so I had to wash the outside and dry it to get them to land inside rather than covering the outside of the jar. As Mom would say, Best laid plans...
Anyhow I seem to have more books going than usual and more on the way - never did read Gone Girl Tomereader but then I do not often read a mystery so that may be why - I do like the cozies as a quick break with ol' Agatha Raisin being my favorite with Hamish not far behind.
A rash of decent sounding books here of late, in addition to have attended a few seminars that opened my eyes to worlds about water I never dreamed existed. Like, do you know there are analysts to determine which water districts are good investments - of course it took me a minute they had to be financed and I never realized they had to attract investors from near and far - it is not local taxes that keep us and our shorelines healthy. So I am reading Sharing the Common Pool by Charles R. Porter, who I know and who lives here in Central Texas and used to be a well respected Real Estate Broker till water called him. Haven't started it yet, however, extending my curiosity is Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind by Brian Fagan and of course the book that is blowing me away that we are reading together this month For Love of Lakes by Darby Nelson.
I started Every Fifteen Minutes by Lisa Scotteline which was not nearly as good a read as her interview on the Tavis Smiley show so I have set it aside for now - I must say as a result of that interview I did pick up and find very interesting The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout ph.d. - a rather easy read and what an eye opener - did you know 4% of the population are narcissistic to the point of being sociopaths which is higher than the over 3% with eating disorders - both overweight and bulimic - who knew?
After that bit I needed some fluff and so it was The PMS Club by Carolyn Brown, who you can always depend on for a bit of 'girl' philosophy in a contemporary setting and a good happy-ever-after ending that you can read in a night or two nights max.
Not finished yet, but oh oh oh - we should all read - No Good Men Among the Living, America, The Taliban, And the War Through the Afghan Eyes by Anand Gopal - it goes back to when we assisted the Afghan people against the Russians through to 2014 and the best we could say is that we bungled things over and over - even early on printing school books where there were none that included aspects of jihad that had been buried and now brought back to light as a call to action for these young school age Afghans when they grew into teens and manhood. The book depicts the good and the bad and NO ONE has clean hands while those we would like to blame as being dirty were often depicted as dirty to cover other political war games - Much of the story is told through the eyes of an educated woman, Heela from a family of journalists and professionals, a graduate of Kabul University - like an old time journalist the story is simply told without editorializing - so it is hard to blame or take sides - it is like a bad dream that unfolded.
I finished, Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris - with all the hype I was not impressed - not a keeper.
Just arrived - in fact today - the Station Eleven we are hearing about here on Senior Learn, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami for my next Murakami F2F meetup in October and By the Lake by John McGahern because of the pre-discussion question, what novels have you read that take place near a lake and all I could think of was the old Walter Scott, The Lady in the Lake plus, I love just about anything written by the Irish.
And finally - again - one thing leads to another - as a result of reading Kristin Lavransdatter along with my grandson spending time in Hamburg Germany this summer, I learned how the Vikings intermingled with the Saxons and shared the same religion till Christianity came along - after reading The Saxon Savior by G Ronald Murphy S.J. and learning to my astonishment, long before any translation of the Bible, other than to Latin, the Saxons had a translation that changed some of the stories to better fit the northern mindset and climate. It appears that the Norwegian Christians would have had to have a copy of the Heliand written in the Ninth century - some of the changes used when writing the northern bible are with us today -
The majority of the Saxons resisted converting. They would promise - keep the promise for maybe 3 years and then back to war this went on and on and on - their religion, like the Scandinavian religion was based on the concept there was a great tree that held up the earth and from it all things grew. (during this time on into the Renaissance many thought the earth was held up by 4 trees and the sky was a bowl that leaked, so the fear was that it would crack open and drown everyone - as explained in The Mighty Acts of God by Robert J. Marshall)
Reading again, how St. Bernard comes along and chops down their sacred tree, this time reading as an adult I was appalled - could just imagine some group coming in and chopping up an alter today and saying we had to change to their religion - in fact I think that is essentially what ISIS is doing in the Middle East - so I want to learn more about the Saxons - not the version Hitler ransacked for his glory but who were these people and how did they and the Vikings mix etc. so I've started with The Saxon Chronicle Volume I by Swan which starts off in the year 782 A.D.
As of now I have a book in just about every room - reminds me of being a kid when there were books started all over the house and always one on the back covered porch to grab on the way to whatever, including reading while walking to the store.
