The pic is from a couple years ago on a Friday evening walking downtown to meet up at the Oscar Tango or wherever for dinner. We don’t do that any more and we did NOT have a clear sky with a full moon today. Nope. Gray fugliness ALL day. Although my salted sidewalk was pretty much dry by this afternoon, it never got quiiiiite warm enough to melt the snow anywhere else. But this is the Great Lake State and it’s winter…

I remember a high school beach urchin once asking – in January – moom, is it gonna snow again? I kinda knew that she was really asking something like, in the next few hours or whatever but I couldn’t help cracking up. I start to relax about snow sometime in March here but we can get snow until sometime in May. When we open the moomincabin on Memorial Day weekend, there is always residual snow in the woods, sometimes a LOT of it.

I finished my Goodreads 2020 reading challenge at 112 books, 12 books over. Does that sound like a lot? My kids are kind of amazed but I think they need to remember all of the books I read to them when they were children. I read to them at night. I read to them at breakfast. I read to them long after they were independent readers. I read picture books when they were small but we started in with “chapter” books well before kindergarten, Charlotte’s Web and Wind in the Willows are two I remember off hand. And “Indian in the Cupboard” on the beach to multiple generations. I did a lot of things wrong as a parent. We all do. Reading was one thing I did right.

The other thing is that while the pandemic has caused a lot of readers to struggle with focus, it had the opposite effect on me. I TOTALLY understand those who are struggling and not sure why I’m not in that particular boat. I do veer toward fiction with a few memoirs thrown in. Beyond that I’m not sure how to define my preferences except I’m not crazy about romance, chick lit, beach reads (usually), or anything too “light” or formulaic. I have been getting more into, whaddya call ’em, crime novels? Well-written ones though. For example, I read Tana French’s Dublin murder books and I don’t consider them formulaic.

The last two books I read in 2020 were memoirs. A WILD one by a woman who defected from North Korea and then brought her family out. Another totally different one by a southern woman of color (black mother/white father) whose mother was brutally murdered by her second ex-husband (i.e., not the author’s father). I loved both of these books and their authors. Forces of nature.

I started “Mexican Gothic” on New Year’s Eve and it is my first finished book for 2021. My taste can be a little weird so it might not be everyone’s cuppa but I loved it, especially the protagonist who is a, uh, force of nature. It featured a wildly dysfunctional family living in a “mushroom house”, which I won’t explain. And then today, I started Vonnegut’s “The Sirens of Titan”. I read that book in high school and couldn’t remember ANYTHING about it. This is a kind of a family read although I don’t think we will be scheduling meetings to have deep intellectual discussions about it. We’re just having fun.

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