Summer reading

I took this picture from the bedroom window this morning with my camera zoom.  Oh, I wish a had dozens of this beautiful pink Echinacea plant. It's another lovely sunny day, with the sun just coming up, although noticeably later. It was still dark when John left for work, and will be that way until next May. The season is subtly changing-- you can already see it in the leaves.
 
It was a noisy night in the Urban Village.  Shouting on the street woke me at 3 am and kept me awake. It's quiet and peaceful outside now, and I just watched my mamma raccoon friend and her two youngsters go by.  I look for them every morning while I'm sitting at my desk writing.

This is a tough town, so I feel for the few wild creatures still trying to make a living here.  Raccoons don't eat cherry tomatoes :-) or do any harm in our yard, other than poop in the corner, so I have no real beef with them.  Hey! There goes another one.  I think they're mostly looking for water this time of year. 

I see on The Writer's Almanac that today is the 80th birthday of Annie Proulx, one of my favorite authors.  She won a Pulitzer Prize for the novel "The Shipping News," which was made into a movie starring Kevin Spacey. She also wrote "Brokeback Mountain, made into a controversial movie, and many other hard-scrabble stories about the West, particularly Wyoming. 

I don't have much time to read in the summer, I'm so busy outside. Mostly watering right now. But I've just started her newest novel, which took her 10 years to write (and will probably take me 10 years to read) called Barkskins. 

It's 700 pages long, about taking down the forests of America, beginning on the East Coast. The novel begins in the 1600's and (I think) goes up to present time. Her writing style is so beautiful: clear and plain, but poetic.  I splurged and bought the hard-cover at Costco so I could take my time reading it.  Dad and Marji, I will save it for you. 

Annie Proulx calls herself “bossy, impatient, reclusively shy, short-tempered, single-minded.”  Click HERE for an interview in the Paris Review.