That’s what my great aunt Elizabeth used to call the irises that grow wild along the Cabin Road. She could be a wee bit cross with wayward smartassical children sometimes but she was a good soul and I remember walking down that road with her as a very small child. I also remember sleeping with my cousins on the front porch [it was enclosed] of The Old Cabin when a big thunderstorm rolled through. She came out to reassure us that it was just Thor, God of Thunder, rolling his bowling balls around. She died when I was in second grade, my first funeral.

Speaking of thunderstorms, I had heavy rain commutes both to and from Cubelandia today. When I got there this morning, there was so much lightning that I didn’t park over by the pond and in fact I didn’t even get out of the Swamp Monster until it had settled down a bit. Long driveway moment. Fortunately no tornadoes meandered into our area but coming home I was sitting trapped (by a stoplight) on the Scio Church bridge over I94 thinking a tornado could easily pick the Swamp Monster up and flip it over onto the freeway. Yes, I have an wild imagination.

I finished the 40th book of my Goodreads challenge today at lunch. Yes, I read at lunch sometimes. I was reading “The Man in the High Castle” (by long-time sci-fi writer Philip Dick) and I am still processing it. The idea is that the allies lost WWII. There is a recent TV series based on this 1962 novel that one of my friends recommends and I think I need to check that out. This friend happens to be Jewish so I have been curious about why she would be enthusiastic about a show that portrays a world in which the Nazis won the war… The next time she is off bubbe duty, I will ask her!

Random-ish thoughts: I liked the book. I wouldn’t give it the topmost rating. That’s complicated. It wasn’t what I expected. I didn’t totally understand it. I glimpsed some little shards where characters experienced moments of unreality throughout the story and I may have put more meaning into those than necessary. Or not. Did the Axis *really* win the war? Or…

A goodreads reviewer pointed out that the characters were not emotionally fleshed out. In other words, it’s a bit hard to get attached to any of the characters. I noticed that when I read the book but it didn’t totally put me off. I was thinking that one of the major characters *was* a woman and I struggled with her but I also thought she ROCKED!

Another thing that was a bit difficult was that the syntax often left out articles. I mean parts of speech like “a”, “an”, “the”. If you did you not have Mrs. Pratt for English, this may not have bothered you. I think this was intentional but might have been more effective if it was limited to dialogue and non-native-English speaking characters. Anyway, I thought it was worth reading (and I will seek out more of his novels) but I think I am also interested to see what modern TV producers have done with a 1962 sci-fi novel whose author died in 1982.

Next up is “The Voyageurs” by Margaret Elphinstone. A beach urchin was reading it at the moomincabin last weekend and I am interested in just about any novel that talks about Sault Ste. Marie at any time in history. John Johnston house? Yeah, been through/walked by that place many times. And donate to the local historical society that keeps it up 🐸

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 30th, 2019 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.