Friday, March 6, 2015

Literary Journeys South

After all of the business of getting ready for things I have not wanted to do much this week. I have done a little pen and ink & I have been reading a lot. My reading it making me want to travel, which seems unlikely this year. At least the places I would like to go do not require a passport! This week I read:
Finding Everett Ruess by David Roberts
& I am reading House of Rain by Craig Childs. And it's making me want to return to the Southwest. So far I have explored a bit in Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. there is still a lot I would like to see in those states, and I have wanted to visit Utah since I was little and saw photos of their geological wonders. I also have never been to Nevada - or maybe we drove through when I was little. I am afraid at age 7 I was not as interested in history as I am now an while I had some interest in nature, I had little patience for long car trips. At any rate, I hope I will make it back down there. I find the desert very soothing. I love the landscape and the desert smells. It's very different from the green green green world we have here in the Pacific Northwest.

Here are a couple of photos I took in Taos:

Back to the books. Finding Everett Ruess is quite a fascinating book. I had read a bit before about and by Everett Ruess. He was a very young desert explorer who vanished in the 30s. His writing was quite passionate, a bit immature but he WAS very young and I think in time would have become a fine writer but no one knows for sure what happened to him. It's a very interesting book about an interesting young man.

House of Rain is sort a combination of a memoir / musings about the rise and dissolution of the anasazi and their kin. I believe the preferred term is "ancestral puebloans". I have always found their architecture, pottery, and artwork to be fascinating and beautiful. One of the places we visited in Taos was Millicent Rogers Museum which has some very beautiful pottery, I really enjoyed that. So I think I will be reading some more about the southwest before I am done with this little trip down literary lane...

Do you have any recommendations?

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