Notable Books, According to Me

Awoke this morning feeling good about life, about living in a place where the air is sweet and fresh, where you need a jacket to sit outside in July to drink your coffee, where the main sounds are the crows cacking and the tickle of squirrels climbing up the barky pine trees. Yes, this house is small, but it has a beautiful ceiling. It rained yesterday. The roof leaked a little over in the corner by the television. It's the first real rain we've had since we bought the place. I found a flashlight to check for other possible leaks, ran the spotlight up and down the ceiling beams. I found a lot of cobwebs, but no other wet places.

I've seen ceilings before that this one is patterned after -- on old adobe porches primarily. Long beams spaced about three feet apart, with planks adjoining in a perpendicular fashion. The boards on the ceiling here are knotty pine and smooth, with rougher beams that are actually supportive and not just decorative. These beams extend through the exterior wall and out to the edge of the porch overhang. On the porch the beams are painted, but inside they have been left natural to darken with age. Now, that the paneled walls inside have all been painted a light off-white, the beauty of the ceiling really strikes out. And now that I have inspected them with a flashlight, the ceiling has also been de-cobwebbed.

The atmosphere here is really conducive to reading and I have been getting a lot of that done. Don't know why I seem to have no time for reading when I'm at home in Texas. I downloaded some books to my Kindle before we left Texas. Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragnoso is the first one I read. It's about a woman's relationship with a pedophile, and is particularly timely with the Jaycee Dugard story so much in the news right now. It was one of those books that hangs with you, disturbs you and makes you try to rationalize. Also downloaded was Remember Ben Clayton by my friend Stephen Harrigan. Stephen is another writer who hales from Corpus Christi, which is our only real connection. He's a wonderful writer and this novel is his best to date. I'm finding it fresh and factual, particularly since it's dealing with a time period I researched considerably for Right From Wrong, and his characters are lively and real. I'm not completely finished with it, and plan to say more about it later.

One thing I have found with all this reading is how easy to handle and convenient the Kindle is. It doesn't tire my hands out the way a real book does, and mine has a little light attached to the cover, so I can read in the dark, which I have been doing for a while every night before I go to sleep. The one thing that is not handy about the Kindle, though, is that it is easy to lose your place, and you never know what page you're on at any given time. There's a bookmark, but it isn't always easy to get back to the mark if you happen to accidentally hit the paging button a few times. The other thing you miss out on with a Kindle, is photographs that might be inside the actual book.

This is the main reason I bought from Barnes & Noble online, with a birthday gift certificate, a book called River of Traps by William DeBuys & Alex Harris. It's about these two men's years living in the New Mexico mountains in the shadow of the Truchas Peaks, and an old Hispanic man who befriended them. Harris is the photographer and there are some lovely full-page black-and-whites inside, and the descriptions and history of the area are beautifully told by DeBuys. The old man, Jacobo, is wise and witty and so familiar to me of similar men I had friendships with during my years of living and working in San Antonio.

Finally, there's a bookmobile that comes to our village once a month from up at Cimarron, which is about halfway between here and Raton. In June, I got a card and checked out two books, one of which turned out to be a lovely, informative treatment of The Mountains of New Mexico by Robert Julyan. The author has visited each of the mountains he discusses, gives so much information about the geography and how the land was formed, that even though I had originally intended to only peruse it for mountains in our area, I ended up reading the entire book cover to cover, and took it with us when we visited the Capulin Volcano when the boys were here. I'm one of those people who needs to know where I am in the world, in a much more detailed way than just by giving an address or distance from some larger town. I still feel a lot of mystery around me here, and won't quit reading until I think I understand this place, its people, its present and its past.

Meanwhile, it's time to take a shower and get this day started. It's nearly noon and I've done nothing but read, drink my coffee, and listen to the birds in the trees.

Onward ....