Yes, right on top of things, you will notice. Only twelve
months have elapsed since I last posted a blog. Time’s aflyin’. Which comes
right out of Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” I just finished. A grand panorama
of life on the plains of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Wyoming and at last, Montana.
I relished this wonderful story of the lives of Texans, Rangers and cowboys and
their women, in the 1860’s. McMurty’s saga finishes for me - well, almost,
there is a stack of books on my table and another in my Kindle ebook - a
wonderful year of reading and rereading, any- and everybody from Louis Begley,
via Umberto Eco and Christopher Hitchens (bless his eloquent, now silenced
voice) all the way to Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel laureate whose marvelous
stories about Istanbul society I much admire.
I am still amazed at my thirst for literature that I have
experienced since retiring to Berlin. Yes, wife Hanne and I enjoy our
membership in a literary circle here. But it meets to infrequently, I need to
feed my literature hunger with dozens and dozens of books in between our
delightful meetings. Joining the ebook world also meant that I can buy up, for
next to nothing sometimes, the Collected Works of, say Herman Melville, Conant
Doyle, Gore Vidal and others. Instead of schlepping a ton of books to our place
in Italy each summer – and back again in the fall – I have my sleek Kindle that
stores it all; at a pleasant bar in Fano, at the nearby Adriatic coast, I have
a good wifi connection that I use to download more books. The life. Haven’t
figured out how to charge Kindle for the Campari Sodas I need to download all
that material…
In between the books, I keep up with the daily news on
Politico, the NYTimes, and Der Spiegel Online. I read about literature in the
electronic version of the NY Review of Books. And I scan the Mercury News of
San Jose, to learn what Silicon Valley is doing. In Berlin, I read the
Tagespiegel and on most days, certainly on Sunday, the Frankfurter Allgemeine,
sometimes the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
I read in German, English and Dutch (Harry Mulish), but my
fervent goal is to read Umberto Eco in Italian; working on it.
So much on the topic of reading. Gotta get back to that last
volume of ….
