Books

Summer means reading, always. In New Hampshire, there were stacks and stacks and shelves of books everywhere you looked. And the Conway Library was a cool haven - it was a Carnegie library, and felt exactly the same as the one in Baltimore, in San Rafael, in San Anselmo. Going to town always meant a trip to the library. As well as ice cream at Stone the Druggist. Marble library, marble soda fountain, marble museum; marble cooled my childhood summers.

In the living room in New Hampshire, couples were curled up on couches, the rest of the grownups relaxed in chairs, and they all were reading. The four cousins were in the kitchen washing dishes; one to wash, one to rinse, one to dry, one to put away. Inevitably, when we were just finished, the grownups would come in with the tray of coffee cups. There was always a puzzle going in the living room, too, and a windup record player for old 78's. Jonah and the Whale, Mairsy Doats and Dosey Doats, Nebuchadnezzer, and the children in the firey furnace. The first grownup book I read a page of was in that living room - it was Look to the Mountain, and was about the settling of the area in the 1700's. The mountain might have been Moat Mountain. Okay, I've just bought a copy of it from Amazon, so I'll be able to tell you what mountain it was. Back to my early reading: I picked up the book, and turned at random to a page, and sat down and read it. I had no idea what it was about (I wasn't much beyond Fun with Dick and Jane), but I read a whole page, and felt a wondrous accomplishment. 

So I'll catch up here with my 2012 summer reading. I finished the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, and loved it. I did catch on to the atheist allusions, but as with many athiest writings, I came away with a sense of awe for something that is even more mysterious than I thought before. Then I read Prince of Tides, which was powerful and dark and brutal and lovely. That one came to me as an example of writing memoir as fiction. It's a fascinating concept. I just got Joan Didion's Blue Nights from the Murphys Library and started reading it earlier this evening. Another memoir book, of course. I hope I haven't already forgotten any books that I've read in the past month.

A book find for Kindle readers: bookbub.com An email a day brings me many free or nearly free books. It's an embarrassment of wealth.

What books will I take with me? What will the Burbank Library be like? 

ps I mailed in my signed lease and check for the first month's rent plus small deposit and I bought moving boxes and tape and paper.