black birds,
flung across the roiling gray winter sky
like jacks from my hand

The Rest of the Herd of Cats Challenge

Tonight I finished An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore. I hadn't seen the movie, so I was looking forward to the book. It was OK. Not great, but OK. Maybe you had to see the movie. Since I'm really into environmental, in an amateur sort of way, I knew most of the information already. Some of the photographs brought it home very graphically though -- that was nice.

The most important thing, for me, in the book was his comparison of our society's response to global warming with the trajectory of our response to the harmfulness of smoking. They look the same: denial leading the way for a good long time. We lost a lot of people to lung cancer and other illnesses, thanks to that denial (which was deliberately planted and fostered by the tobacco industry.) Let's hope we can break out of that denial and start working to save ourselves and the planet before the tipping point has been reached.

100 Years of Solitude

I'm embarrassed to admit this in public, but I just couldn't get into this book, at all. I struggled through 60 pages and was still not enjoying it, or appreciating it, so I put it away. So many people just love this book -- what is it I don't see? Whatever it is, I think it's the chaos that bothers me. "Everybody" loved A Confederacy of Dunces too, but the point of that book also escaped me, as did the humor. I'm much more of a Calvin and Hobbes person, or P.G. Wodehouse.

In other news, I've been locked up in the house all week because the smoke levels from the American River Complex and the Butte Complex have had the air quality in the Unhealthy For Every Living Thing category. It's been a long gruesome week. I've got cabin fever and am antsy because I haven't been able to walk or do water aerobics. The cat's antsy because she doesn't like to stay inside 24/7. The delta breezes came in this morning: the wind chimes are mummering to themselves on the patio, the sky is almost blue, and the sun is white-hot yellow and it hurts to look at it. (It's been a sullen red in the late afternoons, and a bruised orange ball with a dirty corona in the mornings -- you could look at it as long as you wanted with impunity.)

So I'm off to run long overdue, much needed errands, including the final errand for Maya's Granny. With much sadness in my heart and an empty spot where she was in my life for the past 50 years. Life does go on, but still it's hard to let go of that vision of our mutual future.

Better Late Than Never Redux, or, I've Always Been A Reader

Just over at Thinking About ... and ran into the Herding Cats Challenge. Of course I couldn't leave that alone ...

Here's how the challenge goes:

1. List 10 books you have read and love.

2. Pick 3 books you haven’t read before from the ‘favorite books lists’ of other challenge participants. There's a wonderful master list, which makes me nervous because I haven't read a lot of the books on it, and some of my favorites aren't there. Geez, do I march to a different drummer, or what?

3. Read those 3 books, and review them on your blog. The time frame is May - November, 2008.

4. Of course, link to the main challenge blog.

Here, then, are 10 books I have read and LOVED.

1. The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien. I first read this while I was in high school -- and it was one of the books that my friend Joycelyn and I shared a love for. I loved it so much I had to steal them from the public library, because they weren't available to buy here yet. I've read it countless times, always finding some new detail, some new meaning in it. I pestered my ex-husband until he bought me the leather-bound copies. I loved the movies, but it's the books that have my heart.
2. The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson. I just read this book, mainly because my little f2f book club read it, & I found it in a thrift store. I hadn't planned to read it, but when it came to hand I changed my mind. And it's an incredible book! The basic story (it's non-fiction) is the background on the 1893 World Fair in Chicago, polyphanyed with the story of a psychopathic serial killer who lived in Chicago while the Fair was being built. I didn't care so much about that second theme, but it did make for a very interesting interweaving. What was fascinating was the wealth of details and background about the Fair, the personalities involved, the obstacles, the triumphs, the defeats, and how many things in our everyday lives today that originated at the Fair. Read it -- you'll be mesmerized!
3. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. This is the first book I read by Connie Willis, and it endeared her to me forever! The title is the tag line from Three Men in a Boat by Jerome Jerome, which I also adore. Both are hysterically funny, at least to me. Desert island books.
4. Passages by Connie Willis. This book had a powerful effect on me -- so much so that I still remember the plot, several years later (these days I don't remember so good as I used to, & often don't remember the plots of books I've read a short while after I've read them). A seemingly ordinary sci fi story, set a bit in the futue, and then -- the pivotal happening, and it turns into a page turner. I won't give away the plot, except to say that it's about life after death.
5. Winter Solstice by Rosamund Pilcher. A romance that gave me the warm fuzzies, set in the north of Scotland in winter. I like it because it's a story about ordinary people, people who think they've failed at life, finding love in spite of the failures. And also because it's set in Scotland, of course.
6. The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature by Loren Eiseley. Loren Eiseley was an anthropologist, science writer, ecologist and poet who published books of essays and general science. He's best known for the poetic essay style, called the "concealed essay", which he used to explain complex scientific ideas, such as human evolution, and about humanity's relationship with the natural world. These helped inspire the environmental movement. I first came across this book while I was studying archaeology, and it (and all his other books) spoke to me in ways that science or poetry alone could never have done. His essays are mystical, enchanting, delicate filagrees of words and ideas that drew me in and continue to haunt my mind.
7. Bowser the Hound by Thornton Waldo Burgess. "Bowser the Hound, outsmarted so often by Old Man Coyote, is taken advantage of once again when the coyote leads him on a long chase that ends far from the canine's home. But with the the help of Blacky the Crow and other friends, Bowser gets even."
Thornton Waldo Burgess loved the beauty of nature and its living creatures so much that he wrote about them for 50 years. By the time he retired, he had written more than 170 books and 15,000 stories for daily columns in newspapers. Many of his outdoor observations in nature were used as plots for his stories. In his first book, "Old Mother West Wind", published in 1910, the reader meets many of the characters found in later books and stories. These characters include Peter Rabbit, Jimmy Skunk, Sammy Jay, Bobby Raccoon, Joe Otter, Grandfather Frog, Billy Mink, Jerry Muskrat, Spotty the Turtle and of course, Old Mother West Wind and her Merry Little Breezes.
I think I read them all as a kid, and loved them. I named my dog Bowser. And the books fostered a love of the natural world that has been one of the ruling passions of my life. They seem a bit outdated in today's electronic world of DSes and Leapfrogs and tv, etc. I've tried reading them to my grandson but he's not particularly interested, even though he's a budding naturalist and intends to be a zoologist when he grows up. But they hold a special place in my heart, and always will. I think I'll will my collection to him ...
8. The Mitford Series by Jan Karon. I'm not Christian (nor any other religious affiliation) by choice, and find organized religion distasteful and often hyprocritical. Still this gentle love story about a 60 year old Episcopalean priest and a "mature" writer of children's books creates a world I am always sorry to leave. Set in the mythical town of Mitford (which is based on Blowing Rock, North Carolina), the books transport me to a kinder, gentler world -- one that I wished we all really lived in. I've adopted Father Tim's prayer "Let me be a blessing to someone today" as a credo to live my own life by. And would that all denominations and sects were as true to the bedrock reason for religion!
9. New Worlds to Conquer by Richard Halliburton. Halliburton's exploits made him a living legend and provided five best-sellers to his eagerAmerican audience. He died in a blaze of glory and mystery that has never been solved. In 1939 he was attempting to sail a Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, from Hong Kong to San Francisco, when the leaky wreck disappeared without a trace.
When I was growing up in the early 1950's, my mother had all his books, and loved them. I read them also, avidly, at about 9 years old, and they gave me a case of incurable wanderlust, that I submit to even to this day.
One of the places Halliburton wrote about was Petra, the ancient Nabatean capital in southern Jordan, to which he, like everyone else, referred as the ''rose-red city half as old as time.'' (A stirring phrase, that, worthy of Ruskin or Wordsworth, but in fact the work of a feeble, long-forgotten 19th-century English poet named John William Burgon, who had never been there.) "The rose-red city, half as old as time ..." Who wouldn't be capitivated by that phrase? It rings in my memory still, even though I never got the chance to go there, and probably never will now.
In New Worlds to Conquer, Halliburton wrote about "The Place Where The Sun Is Tied": "One hundred of the [Incan] vestal virgins managed to escape [the conquering Spaniards], flee together over the crest of the Andes above Cuzco and disappear down one of the great tropical cañons that descend the eastern slope of the mountains and lead on to Brazil. For four hundred years the fate of these reguess remained an unsolved mystery. Then, in 1911, by archaeological accident, they were found -- found in a secret city at a place in the mountain fastnesses where the Sun is tied." It was Macchu Pichu, of course, and even though we now know his fantasy about its last inhabitants was false, still it created a sense of wonder I never recovered from. Or from his visit to Chichen Itza, and his dive into the ceremonial cenote, all alone at dawn.
Is it any wonder I grew up to be an archaeologist?
10. Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. There are no words, no way for me to begin to convey what a powerful effect this book had on me. I read it just after returning from a month spent in the Four Corners region, working on archaeological digs and going to as many Anasazi ruins as I could. Desert Solitude captures the awful beauty and silence of that land so perfectly, it breaks your heart. I love all his work, but this is the first one I read, and it remains my favorite.

That's ALL? I can't talk about any of the other books I love? Maybe I can sneak in anonymously as someone else and get another 10 on the list ...

These are the three books I'm going to read for this challenge:

1. An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore. I chose this book because I just found it at a thrift store in Laguna Beach. So, it's already in my TBR pile and if I read it, the TBR pile will go down by one. Plus, since I'm such an environmentalist, I'm a bit embarrassed about not having seen the movie, so reading the book will make me feel better.
2. Lilith by George MacDonald. The title caught my eye, because it was the name my friend chose for herself -- a name she adopted in adulthood, somewhere along the way. Since I just lost her, reading this book will be a way to honor her memory. I just grabbed it off of BookMooch, which is a lovely, evil place.
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Also taking up space in my TBR bookcase, and has been for a long time. Way past time to get it read and move it along.

Better Late Than Never

Spring officially sprang yesterday (actually during the night on Wednesday). What an anticlimax. Spring has been sprung here in Northern California since February 8th. That was the date the smell of the wind changed to balmy, the plants leapt into bud and bloom, and the birds started singing. Ross and I went on a walk at the Nature Center the previous Sunday, and it was quiet as winter. Except for a couple of scrub jay squawks and some crows cawing, the air was silent.

We did a Volkswalk on Sunday, and the air was bursting with birds falling into lust. I didn't realize how silent winter actually was until the birds brought spring in with all their throbbing glory.

By now all the exotic (non-native) fruit trees have bloomed and leafed out in their tender spring leaves. The redbud is fading away, the electric pink starting to look tatty. California poppies are in their apogee and the lupines are coming on quickly. Wild mustard and radish have been throbbing away for weeks, and vetch is beginng to show its dusky purple blooms.

Before those of you who live in colder climates begin to pine with jealousy, all this is a definite problem:

The Early Bird Gets Confused
Spring springs early and biologists worry

You probably went to bed Wednesday night in one season and woke up in another, as spring officially began at 1:48 a.m. EDT yesterday. But in fact trees are blossoming and birds are singing earlier than ever, say biologists -- and that's not ideal. Among the consequences of a climate-change-caused early spring: a longer allergy season, longer wildfire season, and disoriented flora and fauna.

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I can personally attest to the allergy part -- I've been knocked right off my pins by this year's bout. Allergy-induced asthma is so deceptive! During the winter I can hike and do all sorts of things -- I exercise, I start to lose a bit of weight. Then spring hits, like a rock, and suddenly I can't walk from the car into the house without panting for breath, when the week before I was doing 8K hikes. Most disspiriting!

The worst of the allergies seem to be over, so next week I'm going to try to get back out there with the Volkswalkers. If I can get enough of a head start over the weekend on my taxes, that is!

High Summer

It's now a month since the day job ended, and I find myself busier than ever. I thought I'd be lolling about on the patio during lazy summer afternoons, and posting here on a regular basis. Instead I'm still cleaning the patio after all these months of neglect -- no lolling about for me!

It's the height of summer here, and it's been a mild one so far. One episode of triple digits but more days of mid to high 80s, which are just lovely. And a good thing too, since all the freon has leaked out of the A/C in the van, leaving me at the mercy of what breezes may blow.

The chicory is blooming and the buckeyes are turning brown and wilted. Grasses are dry and tinderish. If you've seen the news at all lately, you'll know that California is beset by fires: small wild fires up to now, and fortunately quickly put out. Except for the Angora Fire, of course, which ate its way through acres and 250 houses up at Lake Tahoe. We had little rainfall this last winter and the snowpack in the Sierras was very low (55% of average in the north to 40% in the south), so 2007 is shaping up to be the year defined by fire.