I'm stuck in the middle of a book I don't really want to finish. But I sort of have to. It was lent to me by someone who thought I'd really like it and I'll feel like a jerk if I don't finish it before giving it back. I only have about a hundred pages to go...but it feels like a lot more than that.

Meanwhile, I totally ignored the boring book and read Letters from Yellowstone over the weekend. And I loved it. It's in the genre of historical fiction, a genre I do not often find myself drawn to at all really. I bought it 2 years ago while in Yellowstone with my family, taking the long route to LA and a new life of sorts. I bought it because, at the time, I was so enamored with the place that I thought anything at all about it seemed destined to hold my undivided attention. Plus, this particular paperback was a signed copy, long lingering after a book signing in the park that probably happened years before. The thing I so enjoyed about the book was that I genuinely felt transported. I've seen the things the characters were seeing, except that they're scientists and see (at least they would, were they not fictional) the world in a way that is much different than I do. They really see it. They have given names to it. These are the things the book is about, actually, as botanists in 1898 write letters home to their friends and family and try to decipher the boundaries of Science. As I said, it's nothing like what I normally read, but it made me remember my time in Yellowstone and it had a truly lovely passage about the group formed in the park and how they had become a family that is right on target with a lot that has been going through my mind lately. I went to work yesterday and ordered a copy each for my mom and my sister along with a copy of Diane Smith's second novel, Pictures from an Expedition, for myself.



I talked to my dad for about five whole seconds yesterday. That seems to be about all I can take some days. I hear his voice and fall to pieces. Yesterday, especially, since it was September 11. He came to see me at college five years ago yesterday and ate in the cafeteria with me and watched TV's tell us what we already knew. My dad's voice is like a song that I forget I love hearing until it comes on the radio in my car and makes me want to pull off the freeway and park somewhere, anywhere, so I can just listen. Plus, it was my grandmother's birthday. His mother's birthday. And I really need her advice.

Labels: books., family., political stuff.

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