An entire year has passed since an update. That’s ok. The world has continued to revolve around the sun. There’s a new GrandKid on the block!
Lots of books read in the interim…shall I enumerate? Swimming books: The Swimmer as a Hero by Charles Sprawson and Waterlog by Roger Deakin. Did I mention Why we Swim by Bonnie Tsui? My “big book” was The Brothers Karamazov. Wow. Angst, God, Lust and Patricide all rolled into one happy family. A couple of Wharton’s books and then Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Dittleson. Unknown to me before this autobiography, I’m a little speechless at her detached account of her own, painful life. Heartbroken which she would have perhaps scoffed at, and in awe, all at the same time. A crazy cult account which brought back such fond memories…Better to Have Gone by Akash Kapur. Then the aging theme: The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunar Kawabatha and Love in the TIme of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
I read something in the NYT about the “on-line” and “off-line” identity. Is identity related to Don Quixote’s own fantasy of himself? Are we all creating hidalgo’s who we hope become famous. DQ is my “big book” for this year. Could it be that the scribe might have been making fun of the superstar explorers, plundering the new world, bringing back a lust for wealth who had turned knighthood on its head and sent those with wanderlust out to find their fortunes for the crown and themselves? To this end, I’m reading Harry Kelsey’s The First Circumnavigators, Unsung Heroes of the Age of Discovery. Not sure about “heroes” or even “discovery” by it will be interesting as was Charles Corn’s wonderful The Scent of Eden. Greed does not have boundaries. Perhaps there is solace in that? We are not unique? Hmm.
Spring is just around the corner and I hope to germinate some passion flowers as well as a slew of Verbena bonariensis.
