Archive for March, 2010

My personal library’s science section is looking downright pathetic. Unlike other subjects—like modern fiction and history—for which new releases find their way to me effortlessly, my science books just keep staling and aging over there, sadly. And there are far too few of them in general.

Please vote on which recent science release I should read next! You’ll notice a cosmology-physics bent to these titles—that’s because the fields intrigue me, a lot.

Rain and sunbreaks at the Beckmans’, in the spruce forest above Cannon Beach. This was the first weekend that I was willing to believe it might possibly be spring sometime soon. The rain showers, though some of them were quite dense, were soft and almost warm. I shot this with my regular camera (Canon 5D Mark II), which does video. I under-utilize that feature!

The Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition collection of The Sagas of the Icelanders is imposing both for its physical dimensions (hint: doorstoppish) and its content. These prose stories, written down sometime around the 14th century or so based on happenings in the 10th century, are a mix of actual things that happened and (hopefully) apocryphal bloodbaths that surpass any horror movie I’ve seen in terms of very messy body count.

Frank Delaney’s most recent novel is a misty-sweet race through softcore Irish political history, country farms and criminal intrigue. We watch a father’s obsession turn into a son’s fate, in the framework of the Vaudevillian traveling show of the novel’s title character.

This book is charming: Delaney knows how to woo his Ire-phile gaga American audience, and he’s keyed right into his early-1930s setting.

Curiosity. I have it. The frightful 8.8 magnitude quake that jolted poor Chile last Saturday sent out reverberations: the threat of tsunamis all through the Pacific world. As it happened, I was scheduled to spend the weekend at my friend Emma’s family’s house in the misty, spruce-studded hills just above Cannon Beach. The tsunami was scheduled to reach that part of the Oregon coast at right around 3PM local time. I needed to see what this looked like.

It looked like nothing. Too subtle for humans to notice, but very much there. The water changes caused by the far-flung tsunami were merely a foot or so along the western edge of Oregon, but the fluctuations were very real.