• Happy Sacagawea Day! 🧭🧑🏽‍🍼🪶🏞

What are you reading?

Continuing with the wild theme I was out in the garden last week raking up leaves and tidying up in preparation for planting when I noticed my bulbs. When I say "my" bulbs I really mean Mother Nature's. These vigorous green sprouts have been bursting forth every spring since we moved here a dozen years ago. I have no idea what they are besides persistent as they've never flowered. A rabbit or two (are there ever just two for very long?) always nibbles off the top two inches without fail every few days until the plants are spent for the season and they droop and whither back into dormancy for another year. Last week however I was pleasantly surprised to see them tall and slender and untouched. Wonderful! Maybe the bunny family have moved on? I'd all but forgotten about them until this past weekend when I was pushing pea seeds into freshly turned topsoil dreaming of bountiful harvests, turned and saw the rabbits had returned. Drat. I guess I'll have to wait another year for those flowers whatever they are.
Which all prompted me to pluck a book off the shelf I'd always held in reserve for the kids. Kids of all ages would like Watership Down by Richard Adams. A story about a rogue bunch of rabbits who decide to escape a dreary and doomed warren for a courageous cross-country journey across English downs seeking a brighter future. Kids stuff for sure, but an adult could easily read adult themes of politics and social injustice into the story. I chose not to. Just a lighthearted romp through the countryside against all odds with a melancholy ending. Just like my garden?
 
Back to the adult world. Just put down a book I bought Miranda for Christmas The Strawberry Thief by Joanne Harris. I tried to purchase the first books of the series but couldn't find them in stores. I guess I'll be internet shopping for them now anyway. These stories follow a young French woman with powers to read people's character and needs, perhaps looking into their souls; she also taps into the supernatural powers of the Mayan wind God Huracan. She is a witch, and has inherited her powers. In The Strawberry Thief she discovers she has passed these on to her second daughter with startling results. There's also a murder mystery involving the local Catholic priest who's reading the last will and testament of an old man confessing to...and that's how I got wrapped up in a book I had no intention of finishing. Now I'll have to search for the first 3 books (including Chocolat).
With days spent keeping not so very busy close to home and evenings spent eyes deep in books I may yet exhaust the bookshelves.
 
When the two little grandsons were staying with us for the weekend weeks ago (feels like years) I read them a bedtime story. Actually, they pile on the books to put off sleepy time, and I don't mind. I thought as a special treat after I'd read the usual picture books I'd read them something I picked up last winter. It was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, and this edition was one of The Whole Story series, which are unabridged, lavishly illustrated with colour and black and white drawings, maps, photographs and paintings, including brief detailed captions in the margins covering culture, geography, history, customs, science... But I assumed it was a kids story. Who doesn't remember Robert Newton in the 1950 film version Treasure Island? Incidentally I'd read that the actor had actually all but invented the piratical jargon he himself. He made it all up! All the pirate talk that has followed has been down to him. Speaking of which did you know that September 19th is International Pirate Talk Day? Har. Anyway, by the time we got to Blackdog passing the Captain the black spot the g-kids were shivering their timbers under the covers. Hm. We put the book down and picked up something kinder, gentler, and less likely to induce nightmares. What was I thinking? But I picked that book back up this week and have made it my own bedtime reading. It's a good adventure story. No nightmares so far.
 
A pair of robins are staking claim to my yard. There's a bountiful supply of worms in upturned soil from my early spring gardening for them to forage. I hope I find a nest somewhere soon made from mud and grass that'll signal their intentions. Robin's egg blue is a beautiful colour to find, full of promise and new beginnings in this new world of ours. Another visiting feathered pair have quite possibly found a new home in the backyard, as I've watched two chickadees flitting between branches and our hanging birdhouse. As darling as these little birds are I can't begin to imagine how cute their babies might be. But I know we shouldn't regard wildlife as cute or endearing, we must for science sake keep an unemotional detachment from such things. At the best of times I find this hard and particularly in these times it's a challenge not to feel hope in a troubled springtime.
Perhaps this is why I've taken to sitting on my back porch with book in hand and detaching myself from the outside world to seek another. The Best Of Raven; 150 essays from Algonquin Park's popular newsletter - in celebration of the Park Centennial 1893-1993. by Dan Strickland and Russ Rutter, illustrated by Peter Burke. We canoe tripped in Algonquin in the summer of it's centennial year. I have this book, a pack patch and many family memories to mark this special time.

"The Raven has been informing, edifying. and amusing a whole generation of Park visitors. Every week in the summer hundreds of copies go out to lodges, camps, newspaper, and radio stations, where their contents are passed on to countless numbers of people who might otherwise remain unaware of the Park's enormously rich natural and human heritage.- The purpose of this book is to introduce some of Russ's and Dan's best Raven articles as a fitting contribution by The Friends of Algonquin Park to the celebration of the Park Centennial."

These two park naturalists along with this gifted artist bring Algonquin Park to my back porch. Bottomless cup of coffee at my side and a good book in my lap, it's hard not to feel better connected to the natural world in comfort and in joy. I wonder how those nesting birds are doing?
 
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What's in a name?
Rocking in the kitchen this morning after my wife left for work listening to some Hip sipping my coffee when I looked up and saw a cookbook title that stirred my memory. Up on the busy book shelf above the pantry cupboard is a gem, so I pulled it out and leafed through the pages till I came to what mattered. Name Days.
Name days are celebrated in some cultures rather than birthdays, particularly if the person shares their name with a celebrated saint; it may also mark the day you were initiated into a pagan group and took a new name. This book Celtic Folklore Cooking by Joanne Asala provides over 200 traditional recipes as well as food-related proverbs, poems, tales, and customs. She who must be baked for doesn't share her name with any saint nor are we pagan celebrants (most of the time), but her name does have meaning: in Latin it means Worthy Of Admiration, Wonderful. Yes, I can't argue with that. So some name day baking is now nearing completion for when she gets home, a Nut Loaf and Scones. Hope she thinks them wonderful for her birthday tomorrow.
I read we are under the Hawthorn Moon in April, so it's the time for fertility, happiness, prosperity, and peace both inner and external.
 
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Ha, yeah. Pecans. Just to spoil her I'm doing a Burnt Sugar Cake also with pecans. Can you have too many fertility symbols in spring?
 
We have a couple of NUT LOAFS here, starring at each other across the vast expanse of our small living room.

I am reading Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson. I have found that I like history, wish that Mr. Thompson from my high school days hadn't been so boring in having us just memorize a bunch of dates. The only thing I remember him telling us was about a trip where he saw some petrified Dinosaur eggs, he pronounced dinosaur wrong, probably the only reason I remember that.
 
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I'm not one to normally read science fiction but decided to read Dune. I believe it was originally intended as a trilogy and that's probably where I'll stop (recently started the 3rd book). It's good. Not what I expected.

Alan
 
I’ve been enjoying several of the “how to camp” books written in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Currently reading Camping and Woodcraft by Horace Kephart. Really interesting to relate to what is relevant and roll your eyes at how things should be done. Some things never change. Except some of the gear- Can’t imagine walking around in boots with nails through the soles!

Bob
 
Ok, I'll chime in here.
One that I recently finished, and almost made me want to get a canvas canoe - Canoe Trails & Shop Tales, written by a local guy, Hugh Stewart. A mix of some early days in Temagami, some of his longer canoe trips, and about building boats. Will likely buy another one of his books next time we're at the Wakefield farmer's market.
Roy MacGregor's Canoe Country. Some interested stories canoe.
Bush Runner - a good one, though it did take me a while to read it, some great stories about Radisson's life in Canada and around the world in the 1600's.
Nahanni Remembered- for those of you into books about the Nahanni, this is a good one about a guy who went up there in the 1930's to trap for the winter and then floated down on a log raft.
One that I haven't heard mentioned, but is a great read - The Emerald Mile - part history book of humans in the Grand Canyon, partly a telling of the fastest rafting trip down the Grand Canyon during the flood of 1983. Great book.
The Mad Trapper - a fictionalized account of the RCMP chasing Albert Johnson over 50 days in the NWT in the early 1930's
The Monkey Wrench Gang - Edward Abbey - saving the wilderness!
Water - by Mark deVilliers - water issues and challenges around the world
To Save the Wild Earth - Ric Careless - about the environmental campaigns to save some great Cdn wilderness areas - Tatshenshini, Spatsizi, Purcell Mtns, and other areas, mostly in BC.
Finally, for today, one I read during the Covid lockdown, Shake Hands with the Devil - Gen. Dellaire's struggle to stop the genocide in Rwanda

happy reading!
rab
 
Lots of good titles there rabb, thanks for those.

In this time of distancing it may be difficult for some to access books. Aside from the hardcover & softcover kind here at home I also read online.
I stumbled across a writer during a recent internet ramble, Stewart Edward White, and American writer (12 March 1873 – September 18, 1946).
He wrote fiction and non-fiction from 1900 to 1922, often about adventure and travel with a particular interest in natural history and outdoor living.
Here's a list available from the Project Gutenberg free ebooks. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/247
I'll likely read The Forest and Camp And Trail together. Both books contain his musings devoted to canoe travels.
Happy reading.
 
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Reading "Undaunted Courage" by Stephen Ambrose for the third time. Each reading uncovers more of the truth about the Lews & Clark Expedition.
It is June 1806 and the boys have just crossed the Bitteroot Mtns with the help of the Nez Perce. Now they are preparing to head down the Missouri and the Yellowstone Rs.
 
"Summer North of 60" James Raffan. You all probably know this one.

"Lolita" Vladimir Nabokov. IMPORTANT NOTE: I am not a perv - I have been working on reading the Modern Libraries "100 Best Novels" for the last 10 years or so. It's #4. Swear to God.
 
Just finished reading Jerry Pushcar: Water beneath my feet. A book about his trip from New Orleans to Nome in the mid 1970s. (I guess life kept him from finishing it earlier.:))
He wintered twice, near Lake of the Woods and Fort Chipewyan. This was a low budget trip, no high end gear but also no shortage of grit. Well written with a nice compliment of characters along the way. I ended up buying the kindle version for $3.
 
Just finished River by C Fletcher for the second time. Great book.
Now Never Cry Wolf by F Mowat for the first time in decades.
Next up is "The Emerald Mile."
 
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