Chris Bohjalian, who's been mentioned already, also had a book out of compilations from a column he wrote when he moved to Vermont. It's called "Idyll Banter," and I really enjoyed it. Right now, I'm reading "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society," which is a few years old. I'm enjoying it. "The Distant Hours" -- (fiction) about a letter posted in 1941 that reaches its destination in 1992 -- is one of the titles on my to-be-read list. "A Vintage Affair" I read a few books back. Really liked it. A mystery to go along with your cruise theme? Mary Higgins Clark's "Santa Cruise."

You are absolutely correct that learning how to manipulate the shutter speed and aperture to maintain the desired depth of field is the finer points of photography, but with the advent of auto focus and auto exposure controls that is rapidly becoming a lost art. Back in the mid 60's when I learned photography we all we had at best was manual focus and stop down match needle metering. Try shooting action shots at a football game when you have to manually focus and compute the exposure for each shot and you will rapidly find out the action is long gone before you even get a shot off. Add to that, we were working with fixed focal length prime lenses. The solution was to go to the sidelines at mid field (50yd line) and select a lens focal length that would give you closeups at mid field or at either end of the field, typically a 200mm. on the lens barrel you will see a center line that indicates the distance from the camera to the subject. On either side of that index you will see small lines that have an f-stop index number, one on each side of the center focus index. That is the depth of field scale index lines. The smaller the aperture the wider the distance between the index lines, and the greater the depth of field. Rather than focus the lens on a set point, rotate the lens until the infinity mark is on a depth of field index on one side and look at the corresponding depth of field mark on the opposite side to see what the closest focal point is. By example, a 200mm lens at f-16 has a maximum depth of field of 24' to infinity. A 300mm lens at f-16 would give you a depth of field range of 90' to infinity. The ISO or film speed index is equal to the shutter speed at noon daylight at the equator. As we move north or south of the equator the light falls off. On average, at noon in the USA the ISO number is equal to the correct shutter speed with the aperture set at f-11. We need a minimum shutter speed of 250 and f-16 is one f-stop slower than f-11, so we would use ISO 400 film (slightly less than one f-stop faster). With the modern digital cameras offering shutter speeds up to 1600 or 3200 it is much easier. Set the aperture at f-16 and set the ISO at 800 and you could shoot the whole game without making another setting on the camera.

Many of my favorite writers are listed but I will add a couple of ones not mentioned. Finished Pat Conroy's South of Broad a few weeks ago. It still sits by my bed as I just love the way he says things. Very much a South Carolina voice in my head (like my BFF who is long gone). Now I am reading another older (1999) book b y Greg Iles, The Quiet Game. Another 'set in the South' book. He is another writer that I really like.... not really light reading, but very good. Richard North Patterson is another guy that writes well and keeps me up nights. Thanks for the new names for me to check out!

While I don't think books in the printed version will disappear, I do think bookshops are under threat (and I work in one). So many people will come in to browse, then buy the book on line, either as a paper format or e-book. Because our market is relatively small, books in Australia are more expensive than the US or the UK, and when you can purchase from Amazon for less, people will do it. Right now the Aussie dollar is over parity with the greenback (10 years ago we were only getting 55c) and it makes it very reasonable, even with the postage (and of course no postage for e-books). I think people will regret losing a shop where you can come in and browse, check out the content of a book, read a few pages to see if you like the style. But competition is fierce and we, with a main shopping centre street front, heating, lighting, escalators and many staff, can't compete with huge warehouses in the middle of nowhere without these costs.