Welcome to Litsy!

While out with friends this afternoon, I was reminded of the year my kids and I hiked the same hike each week for 52 weeks, and when I got home, I read through the posts I'd published about them on my blog. This post from Week 40 reminded me of what was going on in the world in 2016, and helped explain why I felt so connected to the tagged while reading it this week: http://imperfecthappiness.org/2016/07/09/weekly-walk-40/

This series of essays written during E.B. White's first four years full-time on his Maine farm in the years immediately before and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor feels like a balm and a primer in how to balance attention to world affairs with pursuits that ground us in the daily world in which we spend most of our time. The essays are conversational and humble, and provide glimpses of the man who will become the author of Charlotte's Web.

I was recommending the tagged book to my 16-year-old son because he enjoys history, and I'm finding it a unique perspective on how to live one's everyday life as authoritarianism is spreading and fascist apologists are cropping up. He was on board until I told him the title, at which point he laughed heartily because, while he's quite an intellectual kid, he remains a 16-year-old boy.

#morningperspective

June #storygraph book report, right on track for 52 books this year!

#camplitsy25 pick Wild Dark Shore and a Murderbot novel take first place!

I think that‘s the last of the Murderbot novels. I hope Martha Wells‘ health improves and that she can possibly write more, I‘m obsessed with the series.

She reviewed three books a week for a year, and continued to make occasional contributions until 1933....Parker's column helped to establish the New Yorker voice; wry, puckish, world-weary.

On a book she was finding hard to finish: "One of us, we know, is not functioning properly, and we dare not hope in our inferiority that it is the author".

This collection of newspaper articles from the 1930‘s had a few really interesting ones and then a couple that while they were definitely of the time, they were tough to read now. His perspective of NYC from many different walks of life, rich and poor, during this pivotal time was illuminating and revealing. #BookspinBingo #roll100 @TheAromaofBooks @PuddleJumper

Here are my two Roz Chast cartoons.

@MemoirsForMe @AmyG

According to Storygraph, I‘ve been reading this since last December. But you know something? It‘s the kind of book that almost demands slow reading. Not that the pieces are dense or difficult to read. There is just an attitude of slowing down and treasuring the moment throughout. It‘s been a comforting reading experience in a way. I‘ve got 12 more essays to go. I think it will be bittersweet to finish this volume.