Election and Reading

 Today is finally here. We will be eating dinner - pizza and wine - in front of the TV tonight and will watch the returns as long as we can before finally going to sleep. Neither of us has anywhere to go tomorrow so no need to get early. And of course, there's the pandemic.

I've been spending most of my time this past week and a half attempting to choose a book for my book club that I will lead during one meeting. I began my hunt thinking I would need to choose two, but another person stepped forward and volunteered to do a second book this year. Her books are often a little out there, almost always about a foreign country, or at least an immigrant recent to this country. But I must say they are usually something I would not normally read.

I have it whittled down to three books - I think. The one in the lead is fiction - can I say science fiction - about Albert Einstein in 1905, the year he publishes his famous paper on time. He works in a Swiss post office and he has these dreams, 30 of them, one a night over a period of two and a half months. Each dream has time doing something different - speeding up, going slower, repeating itself, traveling back in time, and giving three different endings to things - just to name a few. I've read it before and enjoyed it. Maybe it will be this year's Flatland. The name of this book is Einstein's Dreams.

The second book is a novel about an older woman living in Seattle, or maybe Portland, who grew up in Russia during the siege of Leningrad in WW2. She was a young woman who was a guide in the famous museum (Hermitage?) giving tours. They had to take the pictures out of the frames for protection and store them. But the frames were hung back up on the walls and the guides were required to memorize everything about the pictures and give tours as if they were still hung. This story is juxtaposed against present-day Seattle where she lives and her granddaughter is getting married. This is complicated with the fact that the woman is suffering from early stages of Alzheimer's and has difficulty remembering things; but she can still remember vividly her tours of the WW2 museum, what she had to recite, and working as a plane spotter on top of the museum at night. Again, I've read it before. The title is The Madonnas of Leningrad.

The last book is a mystery from a series. It is my favorite mystery series and is about a Scotland Yard inspector who is a shell-shocked veteran of the Great War. He carries around with him in his mind, his Scots Sergeant who he had to kill for refusing a direct order. I won't go into the details here, but it a lot more interesting than how I am describing it. This particular story is actually a prequel, 14th in the series which currently stands as 22. Its title is A Fine Summer's Day, and as you might guess is just before the war in 1914. All of the others take place beginning in June 1919 and time-wise progress about 1-2 months each. I think we are at about 1921, but I forget which month. 

I'm half-heartedly thinking of also recommending a nonfiction book I read earlier this year. Written in 2012, Spillover is about viruses and how they spread. By taking and discussing several of last over the past 30 some years, the author gets us ready for the COVID by specifically identifying it. The book was written in 2012!

In addition to that, I am reading four books presently: The End of Your Life Book Club, a memoir; Good-Bye to All That, an autobiography by Robert Graves; On Conan Doyle, a small literary romp about Sir Arthur and his writings; and The Woman in White, a thriller mystery as they called them back then in 1860 when it was written by Wilie Collins. He also wrote The Moonstone in 1868 which I read last year. It was one of the best books I have ever read.

Oh, and I am still watching about two episodes of M*A*S*H daily. By next Monday  Colonel Potter arrives; except for whatever reason, the network, MeTV, is showing the episode where Henry Blake leaves and dies.

Now I have to read before I take a nap before I start to watch the election results. I'll talk about my doctor's visit to the sleep clinic yesterday at another time.