Friday the sun came out for the first time in weeks!
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| The flag at the nearby elementary school looked bright in the sunlight. |
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| The kids were enjoying themselves. |
Mainly, it has been very quiet around here.
- Snow by Viveca Sten is too perfect for our depressing January weather. As the police detective Hanna Ahlander tries and fails to find a missing girl, and then determinedly searches for her murderer, very heavy snow is falling constantly. Incredibly much snow! It’s a dark and stormy book, very sad. Hanna has lost her job with the Stockholm City Police, and joins a small police force in a ski resort near the Norwegian border. There’s a pleasing amount of local color — and there’s Swedish food: “they dig into homemade meatballs served with lingonberry preserve, mashed potatoes, and gravy ….” (p. 311)
- The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton makes a pretty sweeping claim in the title. I found it pretty tough to read, somewhat tedious and digressive. The author covers not just the philosophy, science, and biographies of the three thinkers of the title, but also discusses many other great men: the ancient Greeks, the early Christian scholar Boethius, Moses Mendelssohn, Einstein, Nils Bohr, and many more. (He might also have mentioned one or two women.) As I read, I was overwhelmed by the complex and intertwined ideas from physics, literature, and history, and by constant jumping around among all the different writers, abstract presentations about how we know what we know, and different time frames. Consider this quote from Heisenberg “we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” (p. 114)
- The Widow of Bath by Margot Bennett, a classic British mystery from the early 1950s, is a little too full of clever banter and class-oriented observations for my taste. It had a good ending, though. As in many English mysteries, the word I find myself thinking is “arch.” For example this: “The corridor was dark and odorous. The smell could be divided into five per cent furniture polish, fifteen per cent tomcat, and eighty per cent cooking. All the smells seemed to have been there for a long time. They had no way of escape.” (p. 183)
Dreaming of Paradise
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| The island of Moorea, as seen from the hotel in Tahiti on our trip in 2019. |
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| Albatross nesting on the Galapagos, 2010. (I think the nesting area has been closed to humans now.) |
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| Sunset in Maui, 2003. |
Note: I seem to write a blog post with beautiful beach photos almost every winter and complain about how I wish I were there. Here it is again.
Blog post © 2024 mae e. sander.
Photos © 2003-2024.
