Made a run to the local library yesterday afternoon and stocked up on some more books, and went shopping long enough to buy two new pairs of shorts, seen on the seat there (and to be seen on my seat).

There is Linda Goodman’s post-mortem astrology book on relationships; I started reading that last night and will be working on charts in the next while.

There are several paperback mysteries. I started one last night that includes a lot of feng shui.

There’s a book by Robin Skelton and Jean Kozocari called A Gathering of Ghosts, about hauntings and exorcisms.

James Van Praagh’s Reaching to Heaven is in the stack. He deals with after-death realities.

Emerson - The Mind on Fire is the next biography I will read.

Then three novels and a book called Angels and Awakenings: Stories of the Miraculous by Great Modern Writers,which includes pieces by Oscar Wilde, Leo Tolstoy, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson, among other notables.

I had to quit when I had as many as I could carry.

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Earlier this year I read a biography of Doris Lessing, and wondered if she and Anaïs Nin would have had much in common.

The preface of Lessing’s The Golden Notebook hooked me. She was a sharp observer of human relations, smart as all getout, and went her own way from an early age.

I wonder what she knew of Nin, and vice versa. They'd have had some traits in common . . . both permitting themselves to live as they really wanted, as much as they knew how . . . in spite of the cultural mores surrounding them.

In Lessing's preface, she discusses the focus on the personal life when writing. She knew what Anaïs only felt -- that her subjective experiences and observations were not only important to herself but to the world at large. That, far from being trivial, they were the stuff of all our lives.

Nin excelled at writing about her own life, but that was not respected by the literary world -- it was considered unprofessional, subjective, and of minor relevance until Nin was in her later years and finally managed to get the diaries published. That was when her diaries and their writer became known and loved by people all over the world.

Reading Nin’s diaries led me to The Wilder Shores of Love, by Lesley Blanche. The book contains the biographies of four adventuresome women who preferred the exotic life among camels and wild men. Or something like that. It’s been years since I read it. But I’d recommend it. Truth is far more fascinating than fiction.

Another adventurer was Beryl Smeeton, who liked to travel all over the world in the most dastardly of conditions. She was fond of discomfort, apparently, considering it unprincipled to travel in anything but the most plebeian of conditions like the majority of people had to do. High Endeavours is a biography of Beryl and her husband Miles, who ended up creating a wildlife sanctuary in southern Alberta for the last part of their lives, after many incredible journeys over land and sea.

She was a woman who stood out from the rest of us or at least from those of us who live an *average* life. She was not without her foibles. I was appalled to read that she often left her infant daughter alone in the house for hours at a time while she went off on some excursion or other. The child survived, but her mother’s ability to bugger off and leave her unattended does not impress me as being either smart, loving, or responsible. She must have had a stronger sense of trust in the world of physical reality than I do. She was certainly far braver (and judging by her leaving the infant alone, more foolish).

The farthest I will venture in the next while is a four-hour drive to meet Don and Barney and bring them home. That's tomorrow. I can hardly wait to see them.

xoxoetc
~~~Kate