When stymied, READ!

With things on hold at work, with the grime and the muck to deal with, with very little income, what one does is READ.  Yes, I read a lot, more than a lot, but right now, when my life is sort of like being retired but with no retirement money, sort of like being unemployed but with little benefits, I read All. The. Time.

A couple of books I just finished: "Kingdom of the Blind" by Louise Penny. If you read reviews of Penny's books they sound like typical police/detective novels. They are far from that. Yes, there is Armand Gamache, head of the Canadian Police Force. Yes, there is a tiny village, Three Pines, nestled in the outback of a small Canadian town and yes, there is murder.  But her books are so much more. They are, like my next contestant, ruminations on the human spirit and the human condition. Penny writes so well about family, feuds, revenge and hope and despair, love and hate. She wraps her philosophy in the cloak of mystery but that cloak never truly covers what she is really talking about: life, death, joy and sorrow. 

If you read this blog now and then you know I am a big fan of James Lee Burke, creator of the Dave Robicheaux novels set in Louisiana. His latest novel, "New Iberia Blues" is all over the map character and plot-wise. Sometimes a bit too much, but no one reads Burke simply for the detective story. (It's far too dark and gruesome to be defined as a detective story.)  One reads Burke because of his mastery of the written word and his overriding philosophy of life and death. "The fall sky was such a hard blue you could have struck a match against it, the yellow light so soft it might have been aged inside oak."  He talks in this book about the dead traveling with us, not really gone. I love starting one of his books and I hate finishing it.

Currently I am reading a rather amazing book by Yuval Noah Harari titled "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" and it is that. Totally readable, engaging and incredibly smart and informative, it's basically a narrative about history past and current, society, politics, religion, culture, biology, economics, evolution....... and on and on. Sounds dry but it is anything but that. You can read it start to finish or simply open up the book and read whatever stares up at you. It's a book to find in a used bookstore and have around for years.

Other than that, just reading some junk, weeding out stuff from my life, tossing clothes, shredding papers, using this out of work time somewhat wisely.  Somewhat. This shifting of the sun an hour in the morning makes me crazy, I always feel like it's earlier than it really is and then I look at the clock and WHAT???  It's already 7:00 pm?  Why we have Daylight Savings time is a mystery to me, who are we kidding? We aren't saving anything, the hours of daylight are exactly the same, just moved an hour so we can get an extra bit of daylight in the evening and sacrifice that hour in the morning. Does not work for me but no one asked my opinion, so it goes.

More in another day.

Just because this was one of my favorite movies of 2018, possibly my total fave:  Isle of Dogs photos.