A Gallery of Photos: Winter Up Close and Personal

The outside temperature

Well, I've got to admit:  winter is like that around here.  That's January for you.  We had one day recently when the highest it got was zero.  Then day after day when the temperatures were single digits or sub-zero.  And one night when the wind-chills were down to minus 30.  My furnace was working hard, chugging away.  There it was, doing its best to keep things toasty, even as I bundled up in layers, warm socks, wool scarf, shawl, and a good warm hand-knit wool blanket.  Of course, I stayed indoors as best I could despite feeling house-bound.  But in trying to go out in such temperatures, even breathing through a scarf, I found myself edging toward getting asthma one day when it was 8 degrees.  I didn't want to collapse as I was putting money in the parking meter so I concentrated on staying upright, made my way to the bakery, got my bread, cancelled my other errands, and went home!!  Enough of that!

The beauty of the rising sun on trees out my window ...

... and of a tree covered in ice

(Another view)

It looks like the Antarctic, but in the summer, this is all green grass

The picnic table

Two neighborhood furnaces working at high speed

Where deer sometimes sleep

Best Fiction Reads of 2017

Of the 28 books of fiction that I read this past year, in alphabetical order by author, here are 18 that I especially enjoyed ... including 3 trilogies.  (Non-fiction was listed last time.)


1.  Jo Baker, A Country Road, A Tree.  The title comes from the stage directions for Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot. This book is a fictional but seemingly accurate account of Beckett's life in France during World War II when he joined the Resistance movement.  He was an introvert, appreciated silence but liked people, too.  He and his future wife were nearly caught in Paris but left very quickly after discovering they'd been outed to the Gestapo by a priest, subsequently making their way to what was then the Free Zone in the south of France but which was soon taken over as well.  Beckett preferred staying in France during the war where he had friends and could be of help rather than staying home in Ireland, a neutral country, where he had culture shock upon finding there was such a thing as cream and real coffee.

2.  Bruce Chatwin, On the Black Hill.  Identical Welsh twins live on their parents' farm all their lives, on the boundary of England and Wales.  The story covers 80-plus years.  It's likely among the last of this sort of descriptive late 19th and 20th century prose in the style of Hardy and Lawrence--the hard family life with few amenities.  The book ends around 1980 when video games are now part of the culture and cell phones are about to make an entrance.  A lot of real characters here.  Lots of angst and self-appraisal.  It was published in 1988 just months before Chatwin died.

3.  Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career.  Her full name was Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, and she lived from 1879 to 1954.  This book, her own fictionalized treatment of a memoir, was made into a movie of the same name starring a young Judy Davis and Sam Neill.  It is autobiographical fiction of a teen in 1890's Australia who longs for a brilliant career that taps her imagination, intellect, and ability to work hard.

4.  Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea.  Or, what about The Old Man and the Marlin?  A rather amazing story of how old Santiago, in only a skiff, caught an 18-foot marlin far out to sea from Cuba.  A novella, it received a Pulitzer in 1953.

5.  Penelope Lively, The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories.  Fresh topics, good irony and wit, intelligent, her newest book.  One of my favorite contemporary authors.

6. - 11.  Olivia Manning.  The following 2 trilogies comprise Manning's work called Fortunes of War which was made into a TV mini-series starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson.  (They met while filming it.)  It begins with the start of World War II and though fictionalized follows the author and her husband's route from Europe to the Middle East as the Germans kept advancing.  Lots of local color.  An abundance of well-defined characters.  I found all six books totally engrossing.
          The Balkan Trilogy:
                    Book #1.  The Great Fortune.  Set in Rumania from September
                         1939 to June 1940.
                    Book #2.  The Spoilt City.  Set as the characters are forced out of
                         Rumania and leave for Athens.
                    Book #3.  Friends and Heroes.  Set in Athens, then as they are
                          forced out of Greece to Cairo.
          The Levant Trilogy:
                    Book #4.  The Danger Tree.  Set in Cairo and Alexandria as the
                         Germans are advancing.
                    Book #5.  The Battle Lost and Won.  Describes the battle of
                          Alamein.  Otherwise, set mostly in Cairo.
                    Book #6.  The Sum of Things.  Set in Cairo and the Levant as the
                           war then ends.

12.  Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country.  Excellent, South Africa 1946, a black family and a white family ... and their shared tragedy.  Beautifully written.

13.  Kenneth Roberts, Oliver Wiswell.  A splendid historical novel published in 1940 about the Revolutionary War from the viewpoint of the Loyalists, taking the reader from 1775-1783.  A lot of material that I didn't know.  Quite enthralling.  Highly recommended.  (A gift from a college friend who called it one of the best books she'd ever read.)

14.  John Steinbeck, Cannery Row.  Amusing, precise, poetic.  The Chinese grocer, the bordello's madam, the flophouse guys, the marine biologist, all in a sardine canning section of Monterey, California in the 1930's.

15. - 17.  Katherine Towler, Snow Island Trilogy.  Chronicles the lives of those in a small, tight community on a fictitious island in Narragansett Bay. The time frame is World War II to the Gulf War.  Though each book can be taken separately, they are better as a unit. 
                    Book #1.  Snow Island.
                    Book #2.  Evening Ferry.
                    Book #3.  Island Light.

18.  Anne Tyler, Digging to America.  Two Baltimore families, one Iranian and one American, each adopt a Korean child on the same day and become friends as a result.  Good descriptions of their lives as family members and as representatives of their cultures ... with a nice mixture of the two told in an appealing way.

Best Non-Fiction Reads of 2017

My book reading for this past year pretty well matched other years in terms of the number read.  48 in all.  20 non-fiction, 28 fiction.

In alphabetical order by author, here are the non-fiction titles I liked best.  (Fiction will be listed next time.)


1.  Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself, Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years.  A chuckle-out-loud book describing his life back in the U.S. after living in Britain.  Though at the end, he and his family return to England.

2.  Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.  Dillard-quality writing about her rather privileged life growing up in Pittsburgh.

3.  Vicki Constantine Croke, Elephant Company, An Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II.  The setting is Burma 1920-1946.  The "unlikely hero" is James Howard Williams who worked for a British teak company and was in charge of their working elephants throughout a wide area, finding them courageous, loyal, and truly wonderful beings.  Then after the Japanese invaded and the British left, Williams and the elephants led two amazing evacuations over treacherous trails to India--one for refugees, the other for the elephants themselves so that they wouldn't fall to the Japanese.  Some amazing tales here.

4.  Eric Larson, Dead Wake, The Last Crossing of the Lusitania.  In May 1915, a single torpedo destroyed the Lusitania, Britain's fastest, most beautiful passenger liner, sinking it in only 18 minutes and killing more than a thousand people some dozen miles from the Irish coast.  There were plenty of life boats, but because the ship could not be stopped and because of its tilt and the fact that it sank immediately, only 6 were used.  In addition, after daily drills to familiarize themselves with how to release the life boats, those crew members were instantly killed when the torpedo struck when they were below-decks taking out passengers' luggage for arrival next morning in Liverpool.  It wasn't until another two years when the Germans said that any ship was fair game to submarine attack (including those of neutral nations and passenger ships) that the U.S. entered the war.  Grim and gripping.

5.  Lois Pryce, Lois on the Loose, One Woman, One Motorbike, 20,000 miles across the Americas.  A well-written tale describing the gutsy adventures of an English woman who traveled solo on her motorbike.  This relates her first attempt at such a venture, here from Anchorage to the tip of Argentina during which she encountered terrible winds, terrible roads, sudden snows, hours in customs, totally bare landscape, a prima donna riding companion part way, and oil leaks.  But great chutzpah.

6.  Lois Pryce, Revolutionary Ride, On the Road in Search of the Real Iran. Here in 2013 is our heroine again, riding her motorbike alone through Iran, wearing required hijab and proper Islamic Republic dress.  She had already traveled solo through the Americas (see #5) as well as from London to Cape Town, South Africa.  This book details her experience through Iran plus a good overview of contemporary Iranian history.  She liked the place well enough to return the following year only to find that the rules had changed and those from the U.K. and U.S. could not travel the country alone, only in a group.

7.  Katherine Towler, The Penny Poet of Portsmouth, A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship.  A fellow-writer and resident of Portsmouth, the author finds herself filling the niche of "family member" and unwitting caretaker for Robert Dunn, once New Hampshire's poet laureate and a man who valued his independence but who found himself needing support as he followed the unwritten road to death.  An honest, well-written account.

8.  Harriet Welty-Rochefort, French Toast, An American in Paris Celebrates the Maddening Mysteries of the French.  Funny, concise, enlightening.  We want to be nice; they want to be logical, witty, no matter whether it tramples on someone or not.  We want to have fun; they aren't so concerned with fun.  We spread ourselves wide, new friends, etc; they look to their family.  We smile thinking we'll be liked; they don't take anyone who smiles seriously.  When writing this she'd been married to a Frenchman and living in Paris for 20 years.

9.  Meik Wiking, The Little Book of Hygge, Danish Secrets to Happy Living.  A sweet rendering of the way Danes attain a happy life, especially since their winters are rather dour.  By being cozy with candles, hot drinks, friends, board games, and things that are simple, natural, and homey.