Best Reading of 2015

This post was delayed by the death of the small blog, but I decide my blog is still the place to keep track of certain things, such as the annual review of books, so I am going to publish the results from a couple of years now.


In the place of honour during 2015:

My beloved Instagram


The wonder of curating your own magazine of images, with the possibility of conversing directly with artists and photographers and dog-owners. and making actual friends that you might otherwise never encounter...it's a winning formula and I have enjoyed many happy hours looking at and reading Instagram posts. And posting.







And despite feeling like I read less because of the appeal of Instagram, I controlled my reading more carefully and got thru a lot of great books.

Luckily I still keep LibraryThing active so I can be reminded of books read and enjoyed over the past two years.

I enjoyed a mini-theme around the artist JMW Turner featured in an exhibition at the AGO. They were showing clips from, and I was able to see Mr Turner the movie. It was a great period piece and I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I reacquainted myself with Dark Clue by James Wilson, a lovely dark Victorian-style gothic novel around an investigation of Turner, altho she was born late in his life, so he is not really a Victorian character.

I read and shared with my kids the fantastic graphic memoir Pyong Yang by Guy Delisle, a French-Canadian artist and writer. It's a book we find ourselves returning to to from time to time, both for content and beauty.

Ghost Town, by Patrick McGrath is a set of three short stories about different periods of New York history. I was lucky enough to read it just after a trip there, and I was able to recollect those historic streets way downtown as the setting for the stories. Delicious.

Thug Notes: A Street-Smart Guide to Classic Literature by Sparky Sweets PhD was a laugh-aloud yet totally accurate review of...classic literature. Love it! And it looks great on your shelf.

I read a textbook for a class in Writers' Craft taken by one of my kids, which was also kind on an ultimate reading list of classics and undervalued books: Reading like a Writer by Francine Prose. This book will stay close as a great source of reading ideas, and ways to think about books.

Super Mutant Magic Academy by Canadian artist Jillian Tamaki is a brilliant wordless graphic novel, faintly Potteresque, illustrating the social life of current high school students. Outstanding!

I spent a little time in a kind of Edwardian trance, for some reason a state I adore. I read The Jinx by Théophile Gautier (which is actually a mid-19th C work, but feels impressionistic and pre-war) and
the novella Mortal Coils by a very young Aldous Huxley. Both were incomparably lovely.

I participated in the frenzy over My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. I quite enjoyed it, and I could feel it in relation to the stories of the youth of my Italian in-laws, but when it came time to read on, I just wasn't motivated. If the rest of the books fell in my lap, I might read them, but I didn't seek them out. There was a different kind of frenzy of comment when the real identity of the author was revealed, and I found it distasteful.

A favourite quirky read was The Mathematician's Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer, a novel about the mourning period for a Russian Jewish woman mathematician and a review of her life by one of her less-gifted children. Love a good piece of mathematical fiction.

I am always on about Shakespeare, and the book I studies and loved this year was Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt. As more and more original source material is digitized, many forms of historical research are able to move forward, not least of which is the study and tracking of the life of Shakespeare. There was also a new edition published of Shakespeare's Beehive by antiquarian booksellers George Koppelman and Daniel Wechsler. I really like to stay current with this story, and I really can't believe it isn't better known! The writers are coming to speak at Stratford in 2017, and I have already bought my tickets.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Australian Richard Flanagan was one of those books that sears your memory so that you can never contact something without seeing the images generated by the writer. This book deals with Australian POWs in Japan, and shortly after the book was published the Japanese had an exhibition of records supporting the truth of something that was spoken of in this novel. Scary. Awful. Brilliant.

I read a second Edith Wharton, House of Mirth and found it so much better than Age of Innocence, which seems to be the more popular book and movie. The story is much more brutal, and the characters are stronger. I'm not sure why it is eclipsed.

I started reading Michael Harris's The End of Absence in a library books, and ended up buying it on my Kindle so I could underline his pithy comments about our new world of connectivity.

Finally, I now keep a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo handy by my bed and on my kindle. It really is a revolution of simplicity, and super useful.

I should also note that after reading many references to the brilliant modernist writer Henry Green, of whom neither I nor any of my favourite and exalted reading friends had heard, that in a small group we ordered a set of his titles and shared them around. Final thoughts of all of us: not convinced he should be in the first rank.

I took a run at Johnathan Strange and Mr Norell which had long been on my list to read, and I found it boggy and overlong and abandoned it mid-way. Darn it. I hate when that happens.









Here are the stats
total books: 48
best books: 17 plus 2 alsos
fiction: 9
non-fiction: 7
short stories/novellas: 3
about books: 4
graphic: 2
memoir: 1
how-to: 1
films: 1

It was a good year!

Best Reads of 2013 (Only 8 this year. Sigh.)

Oh my goodness. This weekend I read a couple of books I wanted to record for my 2014 favourites list. And when I opened my Blogger account, I realized I had never completed and posted my 2013 list! Here it is at last! All ready to go, and just waiting there, in the interwebs, alone and unloved.

Somehow, 2013 was not a brilliant year for reading, but there were a few good ones:

I read a few must-reads, and found them formulaic. Step forward:

David Levithan for Every Day





and Rainbow Rowell for Eleanor and Park.








These two books actually made me realize that the teen-age-outsider-romance genre is offically over-mined. The books can be cute and readable. Most YA fiction is strong on plot and character, and goes down easily, but, like hamburgers compared to filet, often wolfed in a hurry; cheap, but even at the price still too many calories for the nourishment provided.




I read a book I expected to be formulaic, and actually copied a quotation to carry around in my device: Step up Anne Tyler for
Back When We Were Grown-ups.







I've written separately about my fabulous Tudor moment this summer, featuring, in part, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, 

and, Namesake by Sue McLeod (in YA, from Pajama Press, a little starlet of Canadian publishing). All great books that make this list.








I did find two graphic efforts quite superior to almost anything I've ever read in the category:



Laika by Nick Abadzis, from 1st Second–possibly the best graphic publishing house on earth. Laika is a fictionalized, graphicized version of the Soviet space program sending Laika the dog into space. Real characters and timelines. Graphic images that brought an extra dimension to the story that words could not. Not exactly beautiful, but SENSATIONAL. I cried through most of the book. My kids cried through most of the book.

Relish by Lucy Knisley is the second graphic memoir by Knisley. I also enjoyed her first, French Milk, and I have actually been reading graphic memoirs, and feel ready to judge among them. Her works are deft and engaging and suitable for the treatment.

I must mention that in my hall of fame as the one of best graphic works ever and best graphic memoir in particular, is Marisa Acocella's Cancer Vixen. So harsh and funny. And heart-breaking and funny. And gross and funny.

Staying with memoirs, one of my real favourite reads of this year, altho it took two tries to get it going, was Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks, by Ken Jennings. He is the guy who at one point had won the most money ever on Jeopardy. (Should I mention that my scrabble-master spouse and I have a secret plan, if we ever need money fast, that we will go to California, and he will go on Wheel of Fortune, and I will go on Jeopardy? No, uh, best keep it secret. Never mind. You remember nothing! *Waves hands spookily*) Jennings was also chosen to play against IBM's computer, Watson, and I realized that I really liked him when underneath his response during Final Jeopardy he wrote on his screen "I for one welcome our new computer overlords". In any case, as a slight geography wonk myself (surprised?) I loved reading all the way people indulge this passion, and I find myself relating stories from the book quite often. His writing style is so engaging, and he is so smart, but also so keyed to pop culture, that it was one of those reading experiences that are like talking to a great friend.



Over the past couple of years I have read a bunch, but a bunch, of laddish science fiction books. I think it is a kind of mini-genre. I found them funny at first, but they were so sophomoric, that despite a certain shock value–which is a quality I often go for–they became boring and many I could not be bothered to finish reading.  I find my buddy Shelf Monkey has recommendations on LibraryThing for these books, one of which actually made it onto the list of best reads:

Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, a super-fun story about how it is grammar which defines past and future, and therefore time travel is all about altering grammatical settings! Wow! Fun! I know, right? Love it!






On the list of laddish also-rans that still might be worth considering we have:

Corey Doctorow's The Rapture of the Nerds:A tale of the singularity, posthumanity, and awkward social situations.
I did abandon this book part way through. Love him so much I might get back to it.




Mark Leynor's Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel. Just about unreadable.

David Wong's John Dies at the End
I did read it all. Apparently also coming as a major motion picture. Or something.









And that's it. The year that was.

The marigold does wonder nervously if all reading will become graphic at some point...?

LibraryThing Early Review

Hijacked: How Your Brain is Fooled by Food
by David A. Kessler MD,
Young Readers Edition adapted by Richie Chevat
from The End of Overeating
Tundra Books, 2013

This is an adapted version for kids, and, sadly, it feels like it was adapted by the "rules" method rather than ability to communicate with kids, with bullet point shout-outs, and breaks in the text. The ideas here are quite interesting, although, like many (if not nearly all) non-fiction books, it should actually just be a long article, as there is too much repetition used to flesh it out to book length. I can only imagine the grown-up version is even worse, with more anecdote and more repetition. (Should I say that again?)

The one key idea is that foods offered by industry with the magic fat:sugar:salt trio are nearly impossible to resist, especially, but not only, if you are not blessed by an inborn ability to govern your appetite. This is an idea to talk with kids about, and teaching my kids to mind themselves and have respect for the temple which is the body feels to me like one of my main jobs as a parent.

My mother is a dietitian, and I am a little jaded about food science, and a bit of a know-it-all, too, but even I was surprised by the fact that processed food is designed to be chewed and swallowed faster SO YOU EAT MORE. I imagine that just pure knowledge of this, and observing it next time we eat something processed, will help move my kids' tastes a little bit back toward food from processed food.

I was also interested to be tuned into the idea that a cute and clever way food companies get around the obligation to list ingredients by amounts is to break up "sugar" into brown sugar, honey, high fructose corn syrup and so on, so each one appears as a much less important part of the food, rather than showing us as a single dominant mass at the top of the list. Food label reading is something we do, especially of breakfast cereals, but I think we might read together labels on bread and ketchup to share that thought and increase our awareness.

I was also interested to think about the paradigm of "eatertainment" used by the restaurant industry, and this is certainly a weakness of mine, rather than that of a fussy kid. Not just a hot dog, but 12 varieties of hot dogs, with exotic topping. And what about serve yourself fro-yo in a dozen flavours to be added to your cup. (Have you seen the shock on faces at the cash register when the fro-yo cups are weighed for payment? There should a calorie counter by weight, too.)

The question is, if your kids are not already fighting a weight battle, which has its own motivations, will knowledge be sufficient to retrain their tastes? I will be following some of the suggestions in the book's final section, "Food Rehab", and I was glad to see exercise there as a twin pillar of food management. We'll see. Knowledge is power, and governing one's appetite is a life-long part of good health, so worth some effort and valuable in any quantity.


I keep a few food-health books handy in the kitchen for reference and recipes, The South Beach Diet (for heart health as well as weight control) by Arthur Agatson






and Ultimate Foods for Ultimate Health: But Don't Forget the Chocolate, by my friend Liz Pearson and her friend Marilyn Smith. This little book will join them so we can check things out right as they occur to us.

OMG Reading is kewl: Best Reading of 2011

I just realized that it is time to prepare my best of 2011 reading list. God! Work...work...work!

Actually, I finished the year on a high note. I read a lot, A LOT, of YA (young adult) fiction this year, and it was really fun. I could spend the rest of my life reading there. However, I received a couple of grown-up books as Christmas presents, something that has become more rare, as even my nearest and dearest are not quite sure of what I have read or what I might like, or more so, what I might already have on my to-read pile.

One of the books I received was Reamde, by Neal Stephenson (2011). He is one of my favourite writers, and all his books are grown-up and enormous. A few of them are historical, and a few of them are (not-quite)-five-minutes-in-the-future, although this one is set squarely in the present. He loves the the intersection of math and words, aka coding, and his books are an actual thrill to read. Even this title, with its multiple meanings: a mash-up of 'read' and 'me' - where are the boundaries between input and self?  Or is it 'remade' at play? (Thanks, O.) Does that refer to the individual, the world, culture, language? These are huge questions, posed so simply and elegantly in the style of the current moment. Plus there is the textual aspect of 'Reamde' being the name of a virus, offered with the misspelling as a clue; plus the textual aspect of it being the name of a ch....no I'll leave it to you to find it out, but it all gives one something to fall asleep thinking about.

After just 100 pages, Reamde was already on the top of the list. "Number One Champion!" (in the delightful words of J-Lo, a pseudonymous alien in Adam Rex's The True Meaning of Smekday. Don't ask. Just get it and read it.) After 400 pages, I was already sad that it had to end. After all 1044 pages, consumed in about 4 days, I decided that it was a really great example of genre fiction, only I can't really figure out what to call the genre. Chinese gaming thrillers? Mobster computer thrillers? Midwestern computer business thrillers? Gaming mobster romantic thrillers? Very readable and engaging, I must say. Which would not necessarily be said of all of Stephenson's books. Or all my choices on this list, for that matter. What a way to end the year!



I think there are about another dozen really great books that I read in 2011, but the books on this list all offered something particular. Anyway, without further ado, here are the other entries, in alphabetical order by author, as usual:

L'elenco telefonico di Atlantide by Tullio Avoledo (The Telephone Directory of Atlantis) (2003) - the story of bank consolidation in Italy, mixed with sci-fi/time travel/Atlantis - like dealing with my actual bank in Italy, but with slightly less humour. Ha ha (laughed grimly). Unfortunately it is still only available in Italian, but I am willing to translate it, if anyone is looking for a translator of Avoledo's work into English. Meanwhile, since I can't buy his books here in Canada, I realized I can buy the next one I want to read as an e-book from his publisher, Einaudi, and read it on my device. In 2011 he published a science fiction novel, Un buon posto per morire, (A Good Place to Die) in collaboration with Davide "Boosta" Dileo, keyboard player of the Turinese band Subsonica. I love the idea of a collaboration, and with a musician at that. The novel won the Emilio Salgari Prize 2012 for the best Italian adventure novel. Coincidentally, this past summer I bought a reissue of a Salgari book, now on my to-read pile, Il corsaro nero (The Black Corsair - actually also available in English) a pirate adventure written in 1898 and recommended by an Italian relative as a high point from his childhood during the war. Everything does connect.



And here is a nice Subsonica video for you to enjoy.
(tutti i miei sbagli: all my mistakes)






And now, back to the books:


The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker (2009) - one of the most poetic writers of our time, writing about poetry writers. Very clever and often very beautiful.




The Year of Miracle and Grief by Leonid Borodin, a Soviet dissident writer (published in English in 1984 and possibly in Russian at that time, too) - this book is mysteriously beautiful and poetic, and, also mysteriously, no one I know has heard of him or it: neither the Russians of my acquaintance, nor the students of Russian of my acquaintance. (Ta-da! Winner of the MOST PRETENTIOUS ENTRY!)

Matched by Ally Condie (2010) - not for the quality of the writing so much as the starting point that even benevolently managed society sucks. (Hello Canada of the future). (I think another grim laugh is in order here, no?) Stood out against the background of dystopian-future teen novels. (I also mentioned this in my post Thumbnails of the Hot Young Adult Book Series.)

A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé (published in English in 2010, in French in 2009) - a perfect book about books in a crowded field, from the beautiful publisher Europaeditions. My full-length review is here.

Switched by Amanda Hocking (2010) - what an accomplishment by an outsider. Hocking wanted to sell her books on Amazon.com at the impulse price of a song on iTunes, so she did. As soon as I read about this phenomenon, I so wanted to support the idea of indie publishing that I rushed to Amazon and bought the book. And then, it was so fun to read, I bought the second. And when I went to buy the third title in the series, I couldn't find it. Anywhere. Then I managed to find out that a publisher had bought it, withdrawn it for further editing and reissue on paper. You go girl!

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (2008) - the concept was so interesting: our current communication environment has already reduced our mental white space to virtually nil, and thinking about it led Ness to write a science fiction about a place where there is no silence in your brain from the thoughts of other living beings. (Also mentioned in Thumbnails of the Hot Young Adult Book Series.)

Catch Me When I Fall - by Patricia Westerhof (2011) - this exquisite Canadian book of short stories took my by surprise. My full-length review is here.




Nine books this year, I guess.  Well!

PS I usually have a lot of reading time during the last few days of the year, and I use them to get in a last couple of books and up my total-books-read-for-the-year stats (TBRY?). This year I read 90 books, my second highest total, after the 92 I read in 2009. You can check my records as Souci on LibraryThing and check the tag for 2011 for the other 80 books of this year, in case you want to dispute my choices. Although you should always remember: de gustibus non est disputandem. There are also tags for 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006, if you care to have a look.

I thought I might also link to my previous "Best of the year" posts:
My Top Reads of 2010
The Nervous Marigold's Top Eleven Fiction Reads of 2009
The Nervous Marigold's Best Reads of 2008

The marigold wonders nervously if I should try for (strive for, or, potential neologism on the model of guesstimate: stryve for) the 100 book challenge on LibraryThing. But, what are the rules? What if I fail? What do I need to sacrifice in order to make it? And why are my posts so long? And does anyone read to the end? And should that matter?

And I guess I need to make a new tag here on the Nervous Marigold: "best of" will do, I think.

LibraryThing Early Review

The Textile Planet
by Sue Lange




It took me a while to catch up with the process of reviewing an e-book. First I found it, in iTunes. Next item on the agenda was finding it and opening it on my iPhone. Then: reading it and reviewing it. I loved the idea and hoped it worked.

A friend finally tipped me off to the real advantage of reading an e-book on an iPhone: when you stop reading (and touching the screen to turn the pages) the book, which is the light by which you read the book, TURNS ITSELF OFF! Is this  not the ideal way to read in the middle of the night?

Once I got into it, I gave this book a try, and right away it showed itself to be a kind of new category: distaff-dystopian. Shall I create a new tag in LibraryThing?? Must rummage around for that.

In the end I found that this book gave me an insight into how short the curve is in e-book publishing. It was actually like reading a promising but unedited manuscript. Lange created a fully realized future universe, but the book needed a strong hand to rein it in a make it a complete winner.

For example, the narrative voice moved smoothly between an omniscient narrator and the stream-of-consciousness of the main character. It was interesting that way, and it worked well. except for the stumbles which could have been fixed. The F-word appeared in full several times but also as "what the eff?" but neither phase of the voice demanded a euphemism.

The characters were believable, but the dialogue was naturalistic to the point of sloppiness, ("Don't try that ol' guilt trick.") with slang of exactly TODAY ("You got the shaft, didn't you?") mixed with self-conscious futurisms ("It was a faster boat, one equipped with a turbo time driver...") Huh?

And there were other glaring anachronisms, as when a character preparing merchandise for inter-galactic shipping marks them with sticky notes and a sharpie–brand-names pin-point-able to our time–while the writer also made up future trade names and marked them with an ®, in itself something that seems like it might not last 100 years let alone 1,000.

I think what could have been useful would have been a rubric to govern future-speak in all its phases–narrative, descriptive and spoken. It would be such a fun project it is almost tempting to just do as an exercise. If only time permitted...

This did turn out to be a fun try at reading an e-book, and how better to enter the immediate future than with a science fiction work on a multi-purpose hand-held device?

The marigold is wondering nervously about "distaff-dystopian".  Am I overstating it as a category? Aside from this book I can only think of The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, yet it seems as though it should be valid as a tag. Are there others? No-one seems to be categorizing anything similar. Help!

Notes from Italy - Good and Bad - 2011

 Good - Food, of course! Burro di Bufala (butter made from buffalo milk [as in the mozzarella]) is awfully good. I think it might be a new product even here, as I have never noticed it in the stores here before. I had read about it in a magazine not long ago, and possibly it is available all over the world by now. It takes a lot to get me to pass up my beloved Burro Sorresino, which comes in an adorable old-fashioned yellow tin, but I had to try it, and it was worth it. Even the butter, on toast, has that slightly “farm-y” taste that I love in mozzarella di bufala. I am keen to try making a spaghetti alla carbonara with it. I love butter with the eggs and bacon of carbonara, even if olive oil might be more authentic.

I am always impressed with the care given to every part of food here. I live in a more northerly climate, in the middle of a big industrial city. Everything is grown elsewhere and shipped in, except for a very few precious items, which can be found in a very few precious restaurants. Food pleasure is available, and must be taken where you find it, but fresh and local, it mostly ain’t.  On the other hand, here everything is fresh and local, and that actually can be so extreme as to limit the menu. It makes me laugh (on the inside) when people are asked to describe what is served at a new restaurant in the area, because the local menu is already set. 

BUT, when you shop at your  little local grocery, the farmer picked the figs (ficchi bianchi - white figs in this case) this morning, and brought them in to his friend at the store (in a kind of gray market transaction). The shopkeeper asks if you are eating the melon right now, because she wants to sell you one that is PERFECTLY ripe right now. The different plums have different seasons a few weeks long and different names, and the nearby town of origin is indicated (or the province of Italy, if they happen to come from that far away – which is still only something like identifying peaches from Niagara in Toronto). The bread has to be eaten today, and all milk is only sold by the litre, and lasts only 3 or 4 days. That’s pretty fresh, and unpreserved.

Bad - Internet access. Will the torture never end???? Somehow trying to arrange for internet access showcases the worst of Italian organization. So much potential, so much openness to new technologies, so much bureaucratic bungling and delay. The past couple of years I have really been excited by the prospect of mobile internet access, and I even bought a device that not only receives a mobile internet signal, but broadcasts to its own little wireless network. Isn’t that awesome for a family of tech users – one little mobile key, powering the internet on a number of devices, and portable to boot? Last year we arrived in mid-July. By the time I purchased the device and tried my best to set it up, fruitlessly, it was already August, the Italian vacation period (yes – all of August) and no qualified help was available. I limped along, at least, with one wireless connection to my device. OK. This year we arrived good and early. I went in good and early to get help setting up the network. No problem. Bought a new sim card, loaded in unlimited data for 30 days. 36 beautiful hours of a mobile wireless network. Then…it died. And the bill had gone home to Canada, and there is no recourse. Now I am in the midst of trying transfer of the sim to my iPhone, in order to take advantage of the access I have paid for, but it does not seem to like it. Of course - the is phone locked! Should I try putting the sim in my old phone, in case unlocking an iPhone buggers it up for use when I return to Canada? Another visit to the stupid store, to figure it out; I almost can’t face it. Many of our favourite bars offer free wi-fi, but…access is complicated and many of the baristas don’t know how to sign you in, and…there are unexplainable periodic interruptions in service, and…we don’t usually go around with computers, for writing, but rather iPhones for jotting. However…

Good – Opportunity to read! I don’t know if it is the heat, or the freedom from the school schedule or the small town pace we are forced to adopt, or our lack of access to TV during all this spare time, but I feel such a sleepy torpor here (is that redundant?) that I spend a lot more time reading than I usually can. I find I am totally able to read whatever I want, no matter how challenging, or silly for that matter. Shout out to Gil here: I finally understand how to enjoy reading an e-book.

If you read an e-book in bed, when you are tired, and you stop touching the screen to turn pages because you are falling asleep, the BOOK SHUTS ITSELF AND TURNS OFF THE LIGHT, so you don’t have to! Oh yes! I had a some books that I was waiting to get at: a couple of LibraryThing early review titles, and I had bought an indie book from Amazon, on principle, from a girl who wanted to share her writing at the price of a tune on iTunes. You go girl! (This is a screen shot of Amanda Hocking's book on my phone.) And then the book turned out to be fun enough for summer reading, when I got around to reading it last week, that I went ahead and bought the 2^nd book of the trilogy. Then I uploaded a couple of sample books from my desktop into iTunes to sync over, and I plan to grab a couple of public domain classics if I can. Now all of you nay-sayers that say “Oh, it’s too small” and “I could never get used to it”: nonsense. Self-shutting-off-reading-light-and-book in one? Doesn’t get better than that at 2:00 a.m. (Said by a person who has always envied insomniacs their extra reading time.)

Bad – No bird watchers among our acquaintances. I think that Pesaro might be quite a diverse mini-eco-system? bio-zone? –sea and shore and rivers and hills, with quite a large nature park nearby. I feel that the birds have multiplied in number and kind over the years I have been coming, probably due to deliberate action to preserve the biosphere, and possibly by the dwindling of the fashion for hunting and eating them. I have a guidebook, but I find I like to look at a few guides to compare for identification purposes, and I can hear lots of birds that I can’t identify through a book. I need a knowledgeable person to tell me which bird makes that trill I am hearing and what bird makes that croak, and whether those large black-winged gulls that I see, which seem to really be northern birds, do in fact range down here now. On fish and shells, a lot of people are pretty good. Birds – still looking for someone.
(PS This is a Blue Tit, the local chickadee, and I have actually seen and identified one this summer, as I usually do. It is just that my list here is so short, darn it!)

Good – The local art shows look promising this year. I plan to attend an opening at the civic museum on Friday, and I have an acquaintance who told me about a small kind of private museum of works restored on behalf of the city by a local business association, and the "new art" museum in town, Centro Arti Visive Pescheria, which is the old (ancient) fish-market is closing a show of documentary photos (yawn) and opening something to do with Rossini that looks fun (yay!)

Bad – None of the music on offer looks like it will offer the thrill of the new that we have enjoyed other years. The Rossini Opera Festival seems to be scaling back (I imagine it’s all about the money). The ancient music series that we have loved in other years is all out of town, so less amenable to impulse. I might try to catch a performance of Rossini’s Petite Messe Solonelle, which is beautiful, and is usually offered several times by several different performance bodies. I've already missed one, but we’ll see,