Finished Into The Wild last week. One of Ian’s editing apprentices gave it to us as a going away present when we left Los Angeles. The book is about a young man who, upon graduating from college, donated all his money to charity and headed into the Alaskan wilderness, where he starved. I’m still not sure what Dave was trying to say. The author argues that it was not this man’s intention to die and explores the various reasons he might have had for heading into harsh country with a rifle, 10 lbs. of rice and no map. But once …
Spent Saturday morning on the beach while Ian reacquainted himself with his boogie board. I watched a pair of tiny, translucent crabs excavate new homes, appearing at their doorways to throw bundles of sand an average distance perhaps five times the length of their bodies. A golden mutt hung out in the shallow water, leaping into waves as they came ashore, always looking seaward, watching her surfer. Another dog, a black lab, refused to stay ashore but kept swimming out to his person, a woman in a flesh-toned bikini who had to haul the dog onto her surfboard and bring …
Reading Wicked, another book which came with the house. The story is good, worth re-reading since there is so much meat in it (What is evil? Where does it come from? What about destiny? Free will? The ties of love and family and moral obligation?), there’s no possible way to get it all the first time. We went for a small evening stroll last night and ended up walking to town. When we got home, I did the math and figured we walked 7 miles. Oops. I made my first attempts at snorkeling earlier this week, mostly just using the …
I am clearly the child of drought. It rained heavily all night, sometimes keeping me up, and into this afternoon. When it finally tapered off, no longer having to yell over it for my voice recognition to hear me was a relief, but I was already anticipating its return. I’m living in a place that gets an average of 50 to 75 inches of rain a year, and I wonder if that’s enough. We went for a late afternoon walk to our local waterfall to see how it liked all the rain. The river is perhaps a foot higher than …
The crickets here are sometimes so insistent they sound like a lightbulb just before it pops into darkness. I want a book on local geology, one on the plants, one on the birds and one more on folk tales. Or maybe one that covers all those and traces how they weave in and out of each other. This place is so radically different from anywhere else I’ve been, mostly, I’m guessing, because it’s such a small island, and it’s so far away from anything else. Ian has the language bug and wants to learn the local pidgin. The house came …
Dan Savage’s Skipping Toward Gomorrah has the honor of being the first book I’ve read here. (It came with the house.) Has anyone introduced Mr. Savage to Michael Moore? I’d love to see what kind of collaboration the two of them would cook up. . . Other books read in the last month in moments when the boxes and the packing tape got overwhelming: Into The Forest, a personal favorite and a reread. The country has collapsed for unexplained reasons, and two sisters must find a way to survive in a world suddenly without electricity, gasoline, telephones, or grocery stores. …