You might want to check out Gerald Durrell's books, especially the memoirs/travel/animal collecting books. They are light nonfiction and most of them have a strong evocation of place. I especially recommend: My Family and Other Animals (about his childhood in Corfu, Greece) The Whispering Land (animal collecting in Argentina) Three Singles to Adventure (animal collecting in British Guiana) Beasts in My Belfry (working in a zoo in England) The Drunken Forest (animal collecting in Argentina and Paraguay) The Bafut Beagles and A Zoo in My Luggage (animal collecting in British Cameroon) Durrell wrote wonderfully (and often humorously) about places, people and animals. Other books that come to mind are Arnaldur Indridason's mysteries that take place in Iceland. At least three have been translated into English (Jar City won the Golden Dagger award). His descriptions of the people, land, weather and society are very true-to-life (although rather bleak, as the policeman protagonist sees a lot of the dark side of life).

One thing I read in the last year had a letter in it left by a character who committed suicide. The letter explained that her suicide had nothing to do with anyone else. Her body just never seemed right or habitable - nothing seemed to fit. And no one ever guessed that about her. I related so much to what she felt, the struggle to figure out where I fit in my environment, feeling I didn't belong anywhere and was invisible. I often feel like a stranger in my own body. It made me start to think about how it's so easy to present an outside facade that has nothing to do with what's going on internally. And maybe if we share a little more, we might get more from others. Anyway, I had a nice philosophical discussion with myself and actually have started being more open with others. I'm drawing myself out of my shell :) "No matter what befalls you, may you always be curious." from "The Memory Palace" by Mira Bartok "I have many questions but no patience to think them through" from The Principles of Uncertainty" by Maira Kalman And one of my favorites from many places: "DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT"

Usually I read five or six nonfiction books for every one fiction, but here lately I've gone through a spurt of novel reading. Fiction takes so much more effort for me that now I'm ready to kick back and pamper myself for a while with the following: The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville, the World's Greatest Traveller by Giles Milton - Sir John is suspected of being one of the biggest travelogue-writing frauds of all time; but was he really? The author attempts to find out by going himself to the places Mandeville claimed to have journeyed through. I just read a bit about Milton going to visit the Patriarchate of the Greek Orthodox Church in Istanbul (Constantinople in Mandeville's time) but he found himself in a seedy part of town and needed directions. Passing an Orthodox Church he stepped inside its door to find a woman in the vestibule. He asked her and after she told him which way to go, Milton asked her if she was a Romioi (a direct descendant of the Roman founders of Constantinople): "No," she said. "I'm Italian. From Bologna." She didn't look Italian, and I asked when she had moved to Istanbul. She paused for a moment, then said: "I think we moved here four centuries ago." If Milton keeps up this sort of thing, I'm going to love this book! The Degaev Affair by Richard Pipes (History, Biography) I'm not well-informed about Russian history, so this bio of an obscure-to-me political terrorist who witnessed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and then directly helped plot the assassination of the chief of Russia's security organization ordinarily would not have attracted me. But I read the back cover anyway, for some reason, and was instantly intrigued because this terrorist, Sergei Degaev, eventually wound up at -- of all places! -- the University of South Dakota as an avuncular mathematics professor known as Alexander Pell. "Jolly little Pell" and his pleasant wife were evidently great favorites of his students, the faculty, and the townspeople. This guy was a terrorist? Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood by Steven Mintz The romanticized notions and nostalgia for the halycon days of childhood can be dispensed with quite quickly when we realize that the whole idea of childhood as we think of it only goes back to around the first part of the twentieth century. Even Samuel Clemens who did more than any other American writer of his day to capture the essence of nineteenth-century boyhood was under no illusions that childhood, for the most part, was about one-tenth bliss and nine-tenths pure hell. This overview of the history of American childhood from the 17th century to the beginning of the 21st century looks to be fascinating -- I sure hope so.

11/10 - Page 3 and it was good and worth picking up. Multiple page quotes are just more I can read & react to so early in the morning, generally I get to quotes when "first light" appears in the sky and dawn cracks, but I was up in "the middle of the night" with coffee, so-called news and so-called weather and doing my duties as demanded by my owners, the 4 feline club.