File under: stuff you find while looking for something else.  

It's a thing that happens with readers: perhaps we gobble up a couple of dozen books a year (wink wink).

In six years, that's a gross. Fast forward ten or twenty years, and frankly, who knows how many books.  Some books remain vivid, but the majority tend to –– fade. 

Highlights linger like the memory of a dream, fragmented but compelling. Perhaps a title or something about the situation or characters, or the appearance of the book itself will persist. 

And while some people can simply let it go...others will be haunted.

So if you have a vague recollection of a book about a thing, set in that place? The one you picked up at the Strand bookstore or the long-lost White Horse Books?

You can probably find it if you want to spend a bit of time. 

And if not, man are there some great books out there waiting to be read.  Hit me up for a recommendation if you like.

​Stay safe, friends.

Do I even need say that my favorite skipper and I are shut in these days? And that I am not complaining?

So far, so good: despite a near-miss on that cancelled trip to Italy, a nearer-miss on the replacement trip to Manhattan, and even though the head-cold plus a random hot flash FEELS like the onset of Covid-19, we are staying healthy.

Knock wood.

I am grateful that we aren't worried about how to feed our family this week. I'm grateful for a nice window to look out. I'm grateful for the sewing skills imbued in me by my sweet mother-in-law. I'm grateful for the internet. 

​From disappointing my running buddy, I quickly went on to wreck my eyesight (Or maybe not, nearly everyone in my extended family was nearsighted.) from hunching over a book in poor light. And boy, did the books help my high school social rep --!

Bibliophile. Bibliophage. Dear Reader. Freaky four-eyes book-worm.  Whatevs.

​Before my eighteenth birthday I got myself set for a four-year reading sabbatical that shaped the rest of my days.

Fredrik Sjö​berg is an entomologist. He's aware how quirky a profession that is. And his particular passion –– hoverflies –– is not especially showy or accessible to the general public.

"Of course I could name a number of very good, very sensible reasons why a person ought to collect flies, but I am not a missionary."

Indeed he is not -- ostensibly -- trying to get his readers interested in hoverflies, fascinating as they may be. In this memoir, he's writing instead about larger questions of obsession and nature (or the outdoors anyway, as he thinks people's passion for "unspoiled" wilderness is a load of hooey).

He's clever and funny, with an original turn to his thinking that startles and charms. (He points out in passing that the only place an entomologist specializing in forensic work on cadavers might have enough work to make a living would be the United States.)
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At the risk of insulting our collective historical memory, let me review the Blitz.  

In around 1939, the Nazis were marching pretty handily across Europe, invading Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, the Channel Islands, toppling governments and sending whole populations of people to work camps.

Basically setting the platinum standard for European evil.

The British kept fighting (on the beaches, on the landing fields, etc., etc...) and in the late summer of 1940, Hitler sent a bomber to  London.  

It might be that the pilots got a bit turned around and only accidentally dropped a cartload of bombs on London's East End. It might be that the Germans were retaliating for a British raid that killed German non-combatants.  

In any case, the German bombs landed in the heart of the city, destroying houses and killing civilians.  Churchill responded by sending a fleet of bombers to hit Berlin. The British succeeded, and then did it a second and third time –– to the disbelief of the Germans, who thought nobody could get to Berlin.  

Naturally, the Germans were outraged. Hitler vowed that if the British wanted to drop bombs on German cities, well by gum, the Germans would drop ten times as many on British cities.

So then began the Blitz –– the German bombers targeted civilian sites, landmarks, population centers, night after night. Tens of thousands of civilians died. Hundreds of thousands were hurt.  

​The bombardment went on without much stop until the following May, when thankfully, Hitler was distracted by the sparkly-sparkly toy that was Russia.

The Blitz was meant to terrorize the British, but instead of losing heart, the Brits dug in their heels. They sent their kids to the countryside, hunkered down in Tube stations,  and continued to do business in a bombed-out city.

​It was "Britain's finest hour," not the least because with the Germans focused on civilian targets, the Royal Air Force caught a break to rebuild their fleet.

Talk about stiff upper lip. 

In Sarah Waters' The Night Watch, the Blitz is the catalyst for the heartbreaking love affair at center stage.

The novel begins in a grey and tired 1948 and runs backward, tracing the fates of four Londoners to the flash-lit beginning in 1941.

Amazing period detail, wrenching emotion, and astonishing characterization makes me wish I'd written this novel.


From Connie Willis, a pair of double-decker novels called Blackout and All Clear are set in the Blitz and focuses on how ordinary people survived it.

In Blackout, historians from Oxford in 2060 travel back in time to observe the Blitz firsthand. As one might expect, their expedition into the past goes awry and they are unable to return home.

All Clear continues the story to its suspenseful conclusion. It's not for everyone, this cement block's worth of story, but it's among my favorites. It juggles multiple storylines with humor, pathos, and a dollop of historical facts for a long immersive experience.  
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Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave turns out to be an examination of the variations of bravery –– from the courage of battle, to the strength to simply keep carrying on –– shown by a handful of Londoners.

Based loosely on the story of the author's own grandparents, the novel is engaging and bittersweet.  I gobbled it up over a weekend.

As I wandered around the inter webs, evidence pointed to Joeseph marrying her twice, once in 1872, and then again in 1897.

Or anyway, there was a second "Newton" bride for him.  It might be trendy to renew one's vows now (Or is it? Renewing vows seems an indicator of heavy marital weather.), but it was not a thing I've heard about in the 1890's. 

A bit more clicketty clicking, and sure enough, Joe marries a Newton gal from Dimock in 1897, but that would be Rosella Newton –– Cornelia Jane's younger sister.  

The book formed my reward for a long day's walk. The book and a pizza. One cannot live on books alone.

The bookstore on the main drag of funky Moab, Utah (Back of Beyond Books) naturally, features the work of Abbey, who worked as a ranger in the area in the late 1950's. 

 Abbey wrote this about Arches National Park: 
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"The air is so dry here I can hardly shave in the mornings. The water and soap dry on my face as I reach for the razor: aridity. It is the driest season of a dry country.  In the afternoons of July and August we may get thundershowers but an hour after the storms pass the surface of the desert is again bone dry."  
​Desert Solitaire, p 142.

It's a long walk, and I kept puzzling over these three peculiar words. Wash. Trail. Leaves. Perhaps I was a little dehydrated, guzzled gallons of water notwithstanding.

Most human language follows a predictable formula: Noun verbs an Object. Dog bites man. Woman reads book about a desert. 

Leaves. Trail. Wash. 


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