I took yesterday off. Woke around 6:30 and lay in bed sipping juice and coffee and reading for an hour, first what poses as news, then poetry—Hanshan and a Western anthology. It was quite pleasant.
This morning I had a very short work day. I was awake at 5 and biked to GANNET around 6:45. I had only to prep the bilge and the small stowage compartment beneath the companionway and was back in the air-conditioned condo by 7:30.
My can of spray paint was delivered today as promised, so tomorrow I will paint the bilge and the small stowage compartment, and painting the interior, other than perhaps some touch up, will be complete. I will still have to sand and oil the floorboards and oil the other remaining wood, but I am almost done with GANNET’s interior.
There are no World Cup matches today and I am having withdrawal symptoms. After posting this, I will catch up with the Tour de France which has been overshadowed by the World Cup.
Only eight more matches left. A quarter final on each of the next four days. The semi-finals next Tuesday and Wednesday. The third place match a week from Saturday. The final a week from Sunday. I make no predictions, but the brackets could result in another France/Argentina final.
Here are the books I read during the first six months of this year.
SAFE OUT HERE George MacDonald Fraser
GABRIEL’S MOON William Boyd
THE CLASSIC TRADITION OF HAIKU
PLAYS Aeschylus
BERLIN SHUFFLE Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
BLOOD MERIDAN Cormac McCarthy
THE PASSENGER Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
THE NAZI CONSPIRACY Brad Meltzer
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF HAIKU
OMEROS Derek Walcott
PLAYS Sophocles
THE JUDAS FIELD Howard Bahr
ZEN POEMS OF CHINA AND JAPAN
PLAYS Euripides
JAPANESE DEATH POEMS
THUNDER AT TWILIGHT Frederic Morton
INES OF MY SOUL Isabel Allende
THE GREAT WALL John Man
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF ENGLISH VERSE
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF JAPANESE VERSE
COMANCHE MOON Larry McMurtry
A NERVOUS SPLENDOR Frederic Morton
DON JUAN Lord Byron
THE PRIVATE LIVES OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS
Sue Roe
THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT Graham Greene
PELICAN ROAD Howard Bahr
THE ART THIEF Michael Finkel
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF HAIKU
SIR WALTER RALEIGH Raleigh Trevalyan
THE SOUND OF WAVES Yukio Mishima
TO A GOD UNKNOWN John Steinbeck
THE DAUGHTERS OF MARS Thomas Keneally
MOUNTAIN HOME
THE BLACK FLOWER Howard Bahr
I had read many of these before and very much admire the two long poems, OMEROS by Derek Walcott and DON JUAN by Lord Byron.
The great find of the year has been the previously unknown to me, Howard Bahr. His THE JUDAS TREE came to me via BookBud. It is an exceptional novel of the Civil War and caused me to buy two more of his books, PELICAN ROAD, about a train wreck, and THE BLACK FLOWER, also about the Civil War.
You will find two books by Frederic Morton, who also came to me via BookBud, THUNDER AT TWILIGHT and A NERVOUS SPLENDOR are both set in Vienna. The first leading up to the start of WWI. The second to the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolph in 1889. Both insightful and excellent.
Raleigh Trevalyan’s biography of his ancestor, SIR WALTER RALEIGH, is a fine biography of one of the more complicated men in English history.
And I particularly enjoyed THE SOUND OF WAVES, by Yukio Mishima.
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