Checking in on this blog for 2024...view below from the back of University of Vermont Campus. Lovely view of the Adirondacks in the distance as well. Reading - in the last couple of months I read Sword of Honor by Evelyn Waugh. One of the best trilogies ever. Set in WWII, and a story of experiences out of the stereotypical WWII mode. Read it. Humor and pathos, reality and unreality. It's all there, and makes you wonder how the war was fought successfully, except that the underlying GRIT evident in the British is on display here, no matter what the idiotic circumstances. Evelyn Waugh has always been one of my favorite writers.
Currently I am reading Letters From Egypt by Lady Lucie Duff Gordon, published in full about 1879, awhile after her death in 1869 in Cairo. She was certainly not typical for her time. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, she sought a warmer climate than Britain, and eventually lived several years in Luxor. Her observations on life, culture, religion and persons in her surrounds are insightful and informative, especially in light of the world we live in today. If her observations had been closely attended to, we might not be in the mess we are today. There are of course, other aspects of her letters which jar on modern ears, but overall her letters are hard to put down. She is both serious and humorous at times, and always very kind.
