Outward bound!

Can't leave home without good reads. Light stuff works well, both literally and well, literally. I suppose I could go and pick up something at Bookaholic that I don't mind leaving behind. Hmm.

I am nearly finished with Women Who Wrote the War. Terrific anecdotes. It is good to remember that the professional paths women have access today have not been paved too long ago. In its epilogue, the author noted that the terrific impact the war correspondents did not really reverberate until two generations later.

Anissa took off with the next book I was going to read, so I picked up the Colette bio Secrets of the Flesh. Someone once wrote that no one evoked Paris like Colette so her image will be fresh in my mind when I arrive. In my CR days The Vagabond made an impression and I have enjoyed the settings of her works but I just can't connect with her characters, and while it might have bothered me at one time, I am OK with that now.

Tangled threads

Anissa and I both feel a bit lost and cranky if we can't escape into reading. Her extremism finds her taking books into the bathtub. In desperation, I have found myself reading almost anything in print put in front of me. In one printmaking class at KU, one fellow classmate got a charge out of finding me reading the newspapers that protected the worksurfaces.

Newby's life in Tuscany is a soothing summer escape, although his (requisite) Italian terms throw a jolt into the narrative, especially if you are only able to pick up the book a few pages at a time. His strength is the ability to evoke environment, however rustic, so that the reader is filled with such longing. I am surprised, though, that he just brings the book to an end without much ado, - just a litany of who died, they left, goodbye, the end.

I have moved on to Marquez's collected short stories. Not good light reading, lots of voices of people observing the twilight after death. They are arranged in the order of creation, so it will be interesting to see how his work changes with time.