Time Marches On

Well, here I am nearly halfway through March, and this is my first post. Not much going on at the moment. We've hired a local man to put in a new fence around our patio and garden, but work has yet to begin on that. I did get my clippings and trimmings off to the Green Center on March 1, which I thought would be a first sign of spring, and in a normal year probably would be, but winter has been lingering even here in Texas this year. Even so we finally got out yesterday and bought that Texas Redbud tree we've been wanting to put in our side yard. I found a good spot for it and got it planted yesterday afternoon, then put up a protective fence around it to discourage the curious little deer who like to eat everything they see.

Other signs of spring include our first sighting of some Robins a few days ago. And our family of Cardinals has returned to our bird bath in the front yard, although I suspect they've been around for most of the winter as well. Perhaps most encouraging is the grass in our front yard, which is beginning to turn from brown to green. Soon I'll have to get out the mower and start cutting it again. Some of the plants in our garden have also begun putting out new shoots, but replanting of any additional garden produce will have to wait for the new fence to be finished.

And so in the meantime I have continued with my reading. After finishing David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, I read Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I'd picked it up years ago, but I guess I wasn't quite ready for a book about a group of old friends in their sixties who've reunited in rural Wales. I can easily understand why it won the Booker Prize in 1986; it's one of his best novels, both funny and also a little caustic, but overall rather generous and forgiving towards all the old devils he's writing about.

After Amis, I turned to John le Carré and his latest, A Delicate Truth. I haven't read anything by him in a very long time. But ever since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, I've been a fan. This last book was similar, but more about the foreign service than actual spies and spy masters, although the quotient of deceit was just about the same as in earlier novels. This one is set more or less in the present, and concerns rogue anti-terrorist activities carried out by the British and Americans with much assistance and intrigue supplied by contractors and professional instigators who have found that exploiting official paranoia can be amusing and profitable, as well as dangerous and even deadly for those who ask too many questions. What is disturbing is the fact that like so much of his fiction, this book has a basis in recent news reports, and rings too true to be simply entertaining.

With our next Men's Book Club selection already finished, Charles Frazier's Nightwoods, I decided I would read Frazier's Cold Mountain, which I'd intended to read ever since it appeared 1997, but just never got around to it. This also gave me a chance to try out the Kindle app on my new iPad Air. I was surprised to find that I liked reading on the new iPad much more than I had on the older first generation one, which was just a bit too heavy for my taste. And while my wife's Kindle Paperwhite is an excellent e-reader, I wanted something with a little more versatility. And I think I've made the right choice for me. The iPad has good battery life, and will serve as a video viewer as well as reader. Cold Mountain was excellent, a very affecting tale of love and war, with fascinating characters and some really good writing. I'm glad I read it as well as Nightwoods, which I appreciated for its writing, but found less captivating otherwise.

Having read one book on the new iPad, I decided to read another. I'd just read an article in a recent New Yorker about E.E. Cummings, and was curious about a reference to The Enormous Room (1922), a book he'd written about his experiences while being held in a detention facility in France during the first world war. Here was another book about the period I've been studying the last several years, and another memoir of World War I, but from a very different perspective. Cummings's writing is nothing if not affected. Although his prose is not quite as idiosyncratic as his poetry, it's close, and if you can't read French, you will be very frustrated by this book; but despite those caveats, it's really a very interesting book. There is no question that Cummings suffered quite seriously from his incarceration, both physically and mentally, yet his almost playful attitude toward the gratuitous meanness of asinine French officials and their appalling treatment of both men and women being held in the most squalid conditions enlivens his telling. Cummings was quite taken by the enforced camaraderie among prisoners, many of whom were memorable characters, while others exhibited more typical behavior of men held in captivity.

I've moved on from The Enormous Room to a biography of Gertrude Bell -- a sort of female counterpart to Lawrence of Arabia -- by Georgina Howell, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations, another Men's Book Club selection, and another book I'm reading on my iPad. I don't know that I've been completely won over to ebooks, but so far I've found the transition to be fairly easy. More on that anon.