Just back from our adventure to the Black Hills. As J. told me earlier in the summer, we had a blast. Tons and tons to do - we merely scratched the surface. Now that we have done a few of the requisite "touristy" things, we'd like to go back and spend more time doing the outdoorsy stuff. We even, much to our surprise, think we might (might) consider camping. EGAD!
The garden aspect of this trip was fabulous. Prairie plants galore!! After I've had time to go through the pictures, I'll do a bit of prairie writing. Unfortunately, it has been extremely dry this summer, so the prairies weren't quite as colorful as usual. But I still learned a ton.
We arrived home last night having driving through storms near St. Peter that had the night before washed out roads near where were staying by Custer State Park, and a few hours after we drove through them, killed people near Winona, MN. Needless to say, we are grateful to be home. It was not a fun drive.
However, books. I did not have as much time to read or listen to books as I had thought. We were busy! I did get to finish a book I had read previously - the third title in Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series, Pardonable Lies. I had forgotten most of the details. Rereading a book can be a good thing - you get to enjoy it all over again. This series does not have quite the grab for me as the Mary Russell books, but they are enjoyable. The writing is fine, not fabulous, and the mysteries somehow always end up being intertwined. Amazing coincidences are commonplace. Now, this doesn't seem to be a resounding endorsement, but I have found the characters likable and spending time in fictional post-WWI England has been educational.
(If I had stayed in teaching, I wanted to develop a course to teach history through fiction. Well written historical fiction can be a great teaching tool -- some people, including me, learn history much better through stories, rather than chronological texts. This is a basis for the field of "public history" - and I expect I could work up a freestanding blog entry on this subject alone. )
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Welcome back!
I can't believe that after a relatively dry summer (I mowed once in July), that it's been so soggy! Local rivers are flooding and I'm battling pools of water in my basement! Yikes!
I enjoy re-reading books as well and I almost accidently did so recently. I started to read a mystery called TAKEN by Kathleen George and after page 6, I thought, "Hmm. Have I read this before?" I consulted the book of lists and sure enough, I read the novel when it first came out in 2001.
So, now I'm on to The Dead Father's Club and it's not letting me down.
Oh, and I do think it would be great to teach history through fiction or to create a thematic literature course around a certain time period.
doc jen :)
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