April 13: Yesterday afternoon I did get some laundry done at a little 24 hour place down the street. There are quite a few of these laundromats scattered throughout the area of Delap that I'm in. The one I was at had an atrocious movie starring Barry Pepper playing on a tv while people waited for their clothes to run their cycles and a teenager with Downs Syndrome was enraptured by the tv. Based on the warning of a couple SM's from the school, I only washed the load and did not bother with the dryers. Everything dried just fine once I was back in my room and had a chance to hang it all up. Later when I went by the resort, it was really busy and I wasn't really interested in buying food just to use their internet, BUT I walked around the property and on a balcony above the restaurant I got a good signal. I know during the day it would be beastly hot on that balcony with no shade, but in the evening with a cool breeze it was just perfect. I checked my email, posted my latest batch of notes and just as I was getting ready to head back home I got a call from Cameron. He wanted to know if I was up for a rematch of Scrabble, so I headed over to the school again, dropping off my computer at home first. Good thing too because it rained steadily while I walked over to the school and I was pretty soaked by the time I got there. The rain is warm though and it actually feels good. Even at 8:30 pm. The moon was full a few days ago and is now waning, but it makes beautiful reflections on the ocean as I approach the school. The variation between high and low tide is substantial, although I have not timed it to go explore the tide pools at the low end of that spectrum.

Brief book reviews:

The Last Juror by John Grisham 486ppg. The jacket of this includes the quote “Classic Grisham, Full of Excitement and Colorful Characters” from the Denver Post. That says it all. The characters are well fleshed out and the story stays interesting with a nice little twist at the end. It relates to a brutal murder trial in a small southern Mississippi town and the aftermath covering approximately the decade of the seventies. While it is another legal thriller, it is told from the point of view of the towns new newspaper publisher, having taken over the nearly bankrupt old county paper, and he chronicles the changes the small community was undergoing. Themes of desegregation, the death of small town businesses, the Bible belt, etc all play intertwined roles in the story.

Last Chance To See by Douglas Adams 216ppg. This is a nonfiction work by the author of The Hitchhikers Guide... in which he travels the world with a conservationist from the World Wildlife Federation to find some of the animals closest to extinction during the time period of the late 80's when the book was written. They include chapters on the White Rhino, Kakapo, Komodo Dragon, Aye Aye, Baiji Dolphin, and several others. While there is a lot of humor in the descriptions of how they made their journey to find these creatures, it is also presenting an important glimpse into the fragility of our planet and the efforts being made to try and protect some of the species at risk.

The Abolition of Man by CS Lewis 121ppg. Essentially the transcripts from three lectures CS Lewis gave on how education shapes morality and an appendix in which he brings examples of his concept of 'The Tao' as presented in the lectures. He analyzes how certain textbooks can subconsciously introduce counter productive ideas to students when the authors put more value in style over substance. He discusses how any hierarchy of beliefs by default falls back on previous beliefs

The Confession of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Green 267ppg. A fantasy in which the title character is born at the end of the 19th century with the bizarre condition of reversed aging. He comes into the world with the appearance of an elderly man and gets younger as the years go by. I mentioned this one already, since it has several similarities to “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”. The story primarily takes place in San Francisco and those historic tidbits made it that much better since that is my birthplace also (the author is a Bay Area native). The title comes from the fact that Max is writing down a history of his life and it is a confession because he used his condition to manipulate a number of people, including his best friend throughout his life (one of the only people to know about his condition). The memoir is a way for him to clarify for those others why he did what he did. As I said before, I did not find Max to be a particularly likable character but he comes across as an authentic one. And if you are looking for a Hollywood ending stick to Benjamin Button. Max Tivoli will not give you what you want.

Istanbul: Memories of a City by Orhan Pamuk 333ppg. Orhan Pamuk is a Nobel prizewinning author, who has lived his entire life in Istanbul. This is both a tribute to the city as he grew up in it and an analysis of how that affects Istanbullus as a collective people. I was fairly engrossed with the first third of the book as Istanbul is a complete unknown to me and the history and descriptions were fascinating. There is a sense in which he, coming from the elite class, has a very different experience than most people in that city and as the book continued his analysis does become repetitive and he spends an enormous amount of time on the lives of four poets/authors that heavily influence him as a young writer. While I did enjoy the first third of the book, I probably would not recommend it to others, although I would still like to see some of his other work.

PastWatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card 398ppg. In an version of the future in which the past has become reviewable and modifiable a group of scientists contemplate the changes that would occur if Columbus had not been able to complete his journey to the new world. It has an interesting presentation of Columbus' singlemindedness in his belief that God had ordained him to find the East by sailing West and how determined his entire life was towards that goal.

Seeker by Jack McDevitt 373ppg. This sci fi story takes place some 9000 years in the future, where a pair of artifact hunters (they seek out old abandoned space ships for 'antiques') are brought a cup which appears to come from a fabled colony that simply vanished after declaring they would start over so far away 'even God could not find them'. Backtracking from the cup they investigate to see if the colony indeed did exist and the fame, glory, and financial rewards a discovery of that magnitude would bring. They must contend with rival salvager's, an establishment that puts them on a similar level with grave robbers, and the only known intelligent alien lifeform besides humans, the Mutes. An entertaining read.

Are You Somebody: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman by Nuala O'Faolain 215ppg. I picked this book up a while ago partly because the title reminded me of a Miranda July short film called (I think) “Are You The Favorite of Somebody?” which contained the intriguing way of conveying the idea that everyone is valued by someone. The book title comes from the author's experiences in public where people will think she is familiar/famous, but unsure where they recognize her from. She is an opinion columnist for The Irish Times and a writer/tv producer who grew up in an Ireland where women writers did not have much of a voice. Religious, societal, educational, and other pressures pushed women down the path of marriage and (perpetual) motherhood. Nuala's life, through a series of what she has come to see as lucky events, took a very different course. From her upbringing in a small Catholic family of nine (small for that time according to her anyway), Catholic schools, deadend jobs in London, writers circles around Oxford, the various passions in her life and her search for love, she outlines the pivotal events that shaped her and brought her to where she is today. I actually thought the afterward added for this paperback edition was the most powerful part of the book and this is one that I will keep.