So I have quite a reading list going. I’ll put them in the order of most interesting.
Losing the Garden by Laura Waterman 2005. Laura and her husband Guy were homesteaders in Vermont. They wrote a couple famous books about hiking in the White Mountains. They are pretty close in lifestyle to the Maine couple Helen and Scott Nearing. But early in the book Laura says that she and Guy purposely avoided the self promotion that resulted in the world tracking to the Nearing’s door.
Laura’s book opens with Guy leaving to commit suicide at the age of 67. We have no idea how he actually did it but it seems to involve climbing up into the White Mountains. Laura starts to talk about how she could never really get Guy to talk about his feelings. She was blown away by him. Really dedicated her life to their union. Now she is telling about the story of the relationship from the beginning. I ordered this book as it was mentioned in the next book.
The Power Notebook by Katie Roiphe 2020. Katie is in the writing business. The jacker cover says she teaches at New York University. I had to go get the jacket cover to look that up. I always take the jackets off books. I claim my father did it. Wife Kim can not understand the idea of book lovers, my father was a printer, not protecting the book. My view of course is that I am protecting the cover as it is much more fragile and likely to get ripped than the book. One of those annoying husbandly habits that just get worse and more annoying over the years,
But I diverge! When riding my bike yearly in Claremont California with the Claremont Senior Bike Group (CSBG tag line “not your average seniors”), I regularly am force to yell “DIVERGENCE”. What I am communicating is that someone has, with clear purpose, just diverted from the group, and asumidly the group path without, communicating to me what exactly is happening. If I had more active brain cells, I would put more words in my yelled sentence but often I am just barely hanging on. I have ended up at peoples homes, going around cul du sacs, lost, all as a result of these divergences. I often have my head down, trying to follow the wheel in front of me and I have no situational awareness that I have just left the group ride. Usually the other riders do not have this problem because they are year round group participants and they have been sitting around for the last 5-10 minutes talking about just this divergence while I have been toiling up the last hill, trying to catch up.
But I diverge! The Power Notebook is Katie talking outloud. She tells us a lot about her wild life. Two small children fathered by different men. In the past she seems to have drawn the ire of some women writers by suggesting that they buck it up and take responsibility for their own lives. This Notebook contains lots of material from other writers and lots of material from Katie’s notebooks where she is trying to figure out her own shit.
Final Draft: collected work of David Carr. I’m only a few articles into this but really liking it. He is in recovery and starts off with stories about other people in recovery. I think he does an excellent job of laying out the story he is telling in a very engaging way.
God knows where I came up with this next book:
And I’d do it Again by Aimee Crocker (1936). Aimee, born Amy, was an hierus to a San Francisco transcontinental rail fortune. She married over and over. Traveled all around the world, especially to Asia. And wrote this tell all book to be sure you knew she had had a good time. It is not deep but I am enjoying it.
A Long Petal in the Sea by Isabel Allende (2020). This is fiction for our couples book club for April. The meeting will have to be by Skype! I think we have been reading a book about every month for the last 20 years with these same 4 couples. Petal started off well with fighting in the Spanish Revolution but I am a little bogged down now about page 100 out of 300. I probably have all these other books going just to have something to do to avoid this one until it picks up again. I have never heard of Isabel but it seems she has written at least 22 other books!
I ordered 2 books about the 1918 pandemic.
Flu by Gina Kolata (1999) Gina has some great stories about people trying to “FIND” the 1918 virus so the RNA? profile can be known. She writes a lot about a 1976 effort to vaccinate the US population against the swine flue. She points out that in a situation like this only the US Federal Government can take on the medical liability. In any year 1000s of people die of cancer, heart attack, stroke, flu etc and as soon as you give the population the same flu shot many of those families will sue whoever is responsible for the shot as having caused their family death. And a jury may just decide in their favor. You have a route around this problem before you start.
American Pandemic by Nancy Bristow (2012) is a little more focused on 1918. I have not gotten as far into it.