Recommended Winter Reading

Suzanne from Take to the Highway went to Newfoundland this summer and I missed it because I haven't read a single blog in 6 months.  My secret is it out! I spent some time last week catching up on a few including hers and I highly recommend you read the series. I'd like to follow up on a comment she made in one post about hiking.  She had inquired about hiking trails and then stumbled across a good one even though the person asked said there weren't any.  To this I will let everyone know that in Newfoundland 95% of land is leased "Crown Land" and is considered accessible to the public and few trails are marked like the Skerwink Trail and East Coast Trail. Best to plainly ask "Where is a good place to go for a walk?" because knowing where to go is sometimes the safe thing with all the cliffs or other obstacles you could come across.  Or just park the car and strike out across the land because private property is not a concept in the same way up there as it is here.  And while you are out bring a bucket and pick as many berries as you want!

Picking wild blueberries in Argentia

No one is going to ask what you are doing on their land if you walk across their "yard", in fact you are more in danger of being invited in for a cuppa tea! It is due to Crown Land that you can pretty much pull over and park your RV wherever you want like Suzanne did, or pack a tent and strike off out into the wild.  Want to know more, here's a link.

Other reading that I am excited to share is Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson.  I was giggling so hard and long during the first chapter that the cats were sure I lost my mind.

Me - pretty darn happy a few days ago to be on a walk when it's above freezing
Wayne - not as happy because his ice is melting for ice fishing

Jenny suffers from a long list of mental illness issues, but you almost forget that because you are laughing so hard at her observations.  The cover features a raccoon with its arms outstretched and a disturbingly cheerful grin...it is based on her real life taxidermy buddy but I will say no more so the laughs aren't spoiled for you. A great quote: "...when cancer victims don’t respond to medication, no one blames the cancer victim; people with mental illness don’t get the same respect."

Now I'm reading Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire by Kurt Andersen, and while I'm not too far into it yet I'm enjoying the look back on how our country has a "rich" history of extreme behavior and belief systems that goes back to the Puritans and other groups who founded this nation.  Our founding fathers who wrote the constitution of course were more about rational thought, but it's been a struggle between rational thought and our tendency to be "predisposed to believe exciting untruths" since the beginning. From the Puritans and Quakers in the 1600's to the birth of Tent Revivals and speaking in tongues in the 1700's Americans moved on to romanticising frontier life and being sucked in by entertaining fibs like traveling medicine shows, and our predisposition to believing in conspiracy theories.  What other countries have given birth to characters of such fantastical blends of truth and fiction like Buffalo Bill and Daniel Boone or have spent decades trying to prove there was a conspiracy around Kennedy's assassination?  Here's a tidbit about the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago I never knew, Aunt Jemima pancake mix was a new invention being advertised and they hired an actual woman to play her while flipping pancakes and telling plantation stories.  Read more here.  Here's a doozy: In the 1890's after a run of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in New York someone decided a great idea was to put on a show that would provide a picture of life in the south called "Black America" featuring “the labors that the Negroes of slavery days engaged in, and the happy, careless life that they lived in their cabins after work hours were over.” Another shocking revelation was that Henry Ford was anti-semitic and even wrote The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem.  Honestly! 

As I'm reading the book I'm amused at the things I recognize in myself, like my love of immersing myself in mysteries and acting out the books I read as a child, especially those frontier stories.  One of my favorites was Caddie Woodlawn, that one probably provided hours of re-enacting entertainment, not to mention the schoolhouse scenarios I made my cousins play out after watching "Little House on the Prairie".  Let's not forget my fascination with the 1893 World's Fair, those Art Deco 1920's and trying to find adventures in the "wild" to this day.  Obviously I'm American enough to suffer from an addiction to nostalgia, but the trick is knowing where to draw the line and know what is real and what is fantasy.

What are you reading?