Good timing

Happy birthday in memoriam to my Sappho (1980-1993), the finest, most enthusiastic furniture scratcher I've ever known.

Sun books for 2004

Many are the books that sit on the shelf all through the winter, because they cannot be read indoors. They require a fuller engagement of the senses, a better sympathy with the warmer lands in which they are set: heat and sunlight, the rustling breeze in the cottonwoods, the smells of grass and roses, the faint drones of busy insects.



Here are the books lined up (so far) to be "sun books" in 2004:

• Lords of the Horizon: A History of the Ottoman Empire (the remaining two-thirds)
  
• Simeti's Travels with a Medieval Queen and maybe On Persephone's Island


• The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales from the Bible
  
• David Macauley's Mosque
  
• Wise Lord of the Sky: Persian Myth
  
• Theocritus' Idylls
  
• Gillian Bradshaw's novel about Caesarion
  
• The Ulysses Voyage : Sea Search for the Odyssey


• Haddawy's The Arabian Nights II


• maybe rereading some Mary Renault and Tanith Lee
  
• more of Edmondo de Amicis' Constantinople, which really is a bit much
  
• and of course, by the end of summer, the latest Falco paperback
  

I can hardly wait! But it needs to get warmer for all of this. Meanwhile, here are a few books I'm in the middle of that can be read inside or out:

• John Muir, Travels in Alaska


• Celtic Christianity: Making Myths and Chasing Dreams, on the many cycles of interest in Celtic saints and religious traditions


• Mark Johnson's The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason
  
  * * *