Prose

Westerns

I don't remember when I lost my love of Westerns. Growing up, I loved them. My first love was Tonto in The Lone Ranger. I was a tree-climber, and the tallest branch I could reach, the one that galloped and bucked in the wind, I called Silver. Nevermind that Tonto's horse was named Scout. That iconic silver horse rearing to the tune of the William Tell Overture was mine too. Read more about Westerns

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Travel Plans

Ah, yes. Travel plans. I don't have any yet this year. But I do have the next best thing. Travel books.

I've been lucky enough to have been able to do a bit of traveling over the past ten years or so, but Rick Steves would probably have me drummed out of any travel group of his based on the weight of my luggage alone. Oh, it's not that I pack an undue change of outfits and my toiletry kit is fairly minimal. No - and you are all way ahead of me on this one - that "Heavy" sticker on my luggage should actually read "Warning: Book Store on Wheels." Read more about Travel Plans

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Ideas

The ideal job, I always imagined, would be one in which I sat around amusing myself one way or another and every once in a while I'd put my finger in the air and say, "I've got an idea."

Today I'm sharing a few people who actually get to do just that. People who get ideas and have somehow talked someone into paying them to pursue them, expand upon them, and share them with us. The idea people here are just a few of those who have helped inform my own take on history, culture, and the world around us. Read more about Ideas

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Reading Christmas

I can't really claim to do that. Read Christmas, that is. Just looked up a list of Christmas books and find that I've read hardly any of 'em. Besides the usuals, of course. You know I've read and and .

In a list from Goodreads, I find , which I must have read, because I have read all of Christie, but I can't remember it for the life of me. Read more about Reading Christmas

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Good House?

"Get out, get out, this is not a good house,
I see no books by P.G. Wodehouse."

I can't remember where I first heard that line but, looking around my own house, I had to conclude that mine was among the bad'uns.

Who the hell was P.G. Wodehouse?

So, being the up and coming literary snob that I was, I toddled off to the nearest library to check one out. (Wodehouseianisms, I must warn you, spring from the old lemon as soon as the subject is broached.) Read more about Good House?

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I'll Never Forget You, Nagapate!

The scene is etched in my memory. A young couple sliding down the muddy trail through the jungle hillside in Borneo, making a dash for the safety of the ship that they hope lies at anchor below. Behind them a tribe of doughty headhunters, who had decided that the novelty of the newcomers had worn off and it was time to add a little something exotic to their extensive collections. Read more about I'll Never Forget You, Nagapate!

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Thanks for the Books

I've won very few awards in my life. I like to think I would have won more if I wasn't so lazy. But the first (and I'm trying to think, but it could be the only one) was for "most books read in kindergarten," away back in 1948. I lived in Badger, Iowa, a town of 300 or so Norwegian farmers and their relatives, and began my education in the same two-room schoolhouse that my grandmother had attended.

Books have been my life since that time. I don't know what I would have done without them. Here are a very few among the proverbial 10,000 things:

CHILDHOOD Read more about Thanks for the Books

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Learning English

When I visited England for the first time back in 1979, I prided myself on knowing all about "chemists" and "lorries" and "boots." When I was asked how I knew all this stuff, I told people I read a lot. Leaving them with the impression that I was talking about all the best in English literature. Oh, I had read my Austen and Dickens and Hardy, but the truth of the matter was that most of the "Englishisms" I knew came directly from Agatha Christie. Read more about Learning English

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Lolita

"...he (Humbert) wants her (Lolita), a living breathing human being, to become stationary, to give up her life for the still life he offers her in return." , Azar Nafisi

It's been too long since I read Vladimir Nabokov's to say anything of my own about it. I don't remember finding anything in it that spoke to me. Read more about Lolita

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