It’s a cold, rainy Monday, and I am thinking about reading. I have always been a reader. I remember so many of the books and authors I read when I was young. Pat the Bunny, Dr. Seuss, Uncle Wiggly, Pippi Longstocking, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Kinman Rawlings, Black Beauty, Black Hearts in Battersea—I could go on. And on. And on.
On Christmas Eve, 1932, in South Detroit, “Saverio Armandonada warmed his hands underneath the tin lunch pail on his lap as he rode the trolley from the Chester Street stop to the River Rouge plant.” So begins Adriana Trigiani’s new novel, Tony’s Wife, which I just, this first day of the new year, finished.
A few years ago, I went on a trip with extended family and a couple of intrepid friends to the Galapagos. The trip involved two nights in Quito, Equador, and a week of travel by boat to the various islands, where khaki-clad naturalists walked us around carefully circumscribed paths, pointing out interesting phenomena: giant tortoises, blue-footed boobies, sharks, sea turtles, flamingoes and all kinds of other fauna and flora and so on.