New books, new thrills!

Last night we had fun with R's sister and her husband and their little girl, as I'd mentioned back on the 16th. B. came over too. We had pizza and talked, while the kids played, and spent about two hours together.

For anniversary presents, R. gave me all three (!) of the books I had wanted from Black Sun Books, the little bookstore on Hilyard. Such a nice bookstore for its size; I can always find history, art, science, travel, essays, or philosophy books I want there. I listed all these books in my journal on June 4th. One's about what the ancient Romans did as tourists, one's about an author's modern travels in search of traces of the ancient religious teacher Zarathustra (Zoroaster), and one is Coleman Barks' translations of Rumi, the Sufi poet.

I'm eager to finish the novel I'm reading now, so I can plunge into these new books. It's called Peter Loon and is by Van Reid, who wrote the Moosepath League books; this one is set in the Maine backwoods in the late 1700s and looks to be both a good story and a good history lesson. I hadn't previously given thought to the tensions between the aristocrats, with their surveyors and land claims, and the regular people who were actually clearing the forests and building farms and lives there.