Off the theme: Book Reviews for the month

Book Reviews by monthly theme A fun way to read would be by the holiday of the month. Since I am working off the cuff and not researching carefully, I will simply recommend fun books that I can think of "off the cuff":

DECEMBER- a series of books by various authors feature cats in the title One I bought for a $1 at a 2nd hand shop is CAT DECK THE HALLS, by Shirley Rousseau Murphy, a Joe Grey Mystery

JANUARY - CAT OF THE CENTURY, RITA MAE BROWN (Cats in the title and a calendar/date reference)

FEBRUARY - A fun series from years ago and romantic for VALENTINE'S DAY: GRIFFIN AND SABINE, a recent popular novel - A Fall of Marigolds is also a LOVE story A Serious Read for BLACK HISTORY MONTH: non-fiction - CASTE, b Isabelle Wilkerson

MARCH - WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH so so many to recommend but my latest is a non-fiction biography PELOSI by Molly Ball Excellent Read and timely

APRIL - A book I enjoyed many years ago that is good for EASTER is THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS, a different take on Easter - The Easter Rebellion in Ireland has many good books

FOR EARTH DAY - I RECOMMEND: DIET FOR A SMALL PLANET BY Frances Moore Lappe - another oldie but goody

MAY - MOTHER'S DAY - Any book about the mothers of the WOMEN'S REVOLUTION: a new biography of Gloria Steinem

JUNE - ANY BOOK ABOUT THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, BUT IF YOU HAVE NEVER READ IT TRY A TALE OF TWO CITIES "TT was the worst of times, it was the best of times, it was a time very much like the present."!

JULY - THE BRITISH ARE COMING in time for 4th of July 4th

AUGUST - NATIONAL MOUNTAIN CLIMBING DAY - I recommend an author John Krakauer who wrote Into The WILD, and Cheryl Strayed who wrote WILD about her hike of the Pacific Coast Trail

SEPTEMBER - Napoleon's entrance into Moscow: If you have never read it WAR AND PEACE!

OCTOBER - HALLOWEEN: If you have never read it try: FRANKENSTEIN by MARY SHELLEY (and you can always read a biography of her famous mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, for Mother's Day! in May)

NOVEMBER: I recommend reading any books of current history about Native Americans and I loved SMOKE SIGNALS, BY SHERMAN ALEXEI and also LOUISE ERDRICH

And we are back to Christmas - every year read A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN WALES by Dylan Thomas! It is lovely

Happy Holidays book lovers! wrightj45@yahoo.com

HISTORY LOVERS AND THOSE WHO LOVE NEW JERSEY CAN PROBABLY THINK OF A BOOK TITLE FROM THESE SUBJECT AREAS FOR EACH MONTH - GO FOR IT!

Snake Stories for Valentine's Day

This morning, Sunday, February 14th, 20212 when I awoke, I was thinking of food storage to last through the long frozen winters of the northern lands, not that we arent' experiencing a frozen winter ourselves at this time. But I was thinking of the past. Lately I have watched a series called The Last Kingdom, about the English hero, King Alred, who stopped the Danish Viking invasion of what would become England. It is a mostly historically correct film version of a series of books by Bernard Cornwall about the Anglo Saxons. It made me think of food storage to last through the frozen months: nuts, grains, dried berries, root vegetables like potatoes and carrots, apples. And that made me think of the little spoilers, mice and rats! Not only our competitors for food but, as we know now, the carriers of the lethal fleas that brought pestilence. That made me think of snakes and a winter's evening when I sat with some fellow folunteers in the kitchen of historic Whitall House at Red Bank Battlefield enjoying the dinner prepared by the hearth cooks, Terry and Eleanor. From uner the wood pile came a huge black snake. When I brought it to the attention of the others, our Head Historian and curator, Meghan Giordano said, "Oh don't worry about her, she lives here!." She told us the name she had given to the snake but I have forgotten it now. It was a black "Rat Snake" a non poisonous hunter of mice and rats, and, I would presume a helpful household guest to those with a dirt storage cellar in Colonial Days as the snake would eat the mice and rats but not the grain or vegetables. I have three snake stories. One day my mother was driving her old white Dodge Mirada downtown in Petersburg, West Virginia where my parents had moved after retirement. She saw a snake coue out from under the dashboard. She went to the local gas station and told the mechanic, but his search revealed nothing, so my mother went on her way. This happened several times, always when my mother was alone in the car. Soon people began to doubt her. My mother and father drove up and down the 7 hour ride from West Virginia to New Jersey half a dozen times a year and my father never saw the snake. Then one day when the family was gathered from New Jersey and five or six of us were squeezed into the car to go grocery shopping. My father put the groceries in the trunk and when we got home, we all got out of the car and my father liften the trunk lid and there was a huge black snake slithering around the bags! "Get into the house!" My father hollered and we all ran to the guest room where there was a window overlooking the car in the drive. We watched as my father carefully lifted the snake up with a grden rake and lofted it into the trees next to the house. We came back out to get the groceries an my father lifted the floor board of the trunk and underneath was a vast graveyard of mouse bones from the years the snake had made its home in the underworld of the Dodge Mirada! My own snake story is also set in West Virginia. On a hike in the Dolly Sods, a Tundra region of the mountains not too far from where my parents lived, I decided to sit on a rocky outcropping over a spectacular view so I could do some yoga and stretch from the difficult uphill hiking. My companion at the time, went off to roam around the nearby area. After about 15 minutes of yoga stretches, I did a sitting meditation, then reached over the edge of the outcropping to pull myself up. Right beneath me, by a couple of feet was another rocky shelf and on it sat a huge rattlesnake, calmly gazing at me. I could count the rattles on its tail, there were nine, but it wasn't shaking it in warning, just sitting there sunning itself and perhaps doing its own meditation. I slowly and quietly got up, took a photo of the snake, then left in peace and wonderment. These snake stories are about peace and friendship among species, the kind of hope and trust we all rely on that if we are peaceful, so will be those whom we encounter. It isn't always true, of course, but here are three stories of a kind of love where we were all peaceful and friendly. Happy Valentine's Day. Jo Ann Wright wrightj45@yahoo.com

Tenth Anniversary on BLOGGER

Today, January 17, 2021, just before I shut down my laptop for the night, I decided to scroll back through all my blogs. I realized, that I had been posting for over 10 years as of November. There are 915 blog posts and a quarter of a million views though only 17 followers and not very many comments - a great many spam comments however. When I began in 2010, I had been retired for 4 years and had begun volunteering at many historic sites as a docent or in other capacities. Also, my car and my eyesight being younger and in better shape, I had been doing a great deal of driving and exploring. Since those early days, a lot has changed both in my life and in the world. Sadly, in many ways, age has caught up to me and fenced me in. A torn meniscus (cartilage in the knee) started the curtailment of my active outdoor life. Osteo-arthritis struck and my back also became a problem. Eventually my car began to age out of the long drives to places such as the Bayshore Discovery Project down at Port Norris on the Maurice River, or Greenwich village on the Cohansey. Eventually between the arthritis in my knees and my back, I couldn't really manage historic house tours anymore and had to give up most volunteer work. Those avenues closed, however, I became more active with painting. For the past several years, I have participated in every show to which I received a "call for artists" e-mail from the Eiland Arts Center, as well as the first Atsion Arts Fair last summer. Then, of course, in 2020 came the Pandemic and my activities became even more curtailed. That put an end to the many Camden County Historical Society events I had enjoyed, including their history day events when all the local historical sites were open for visits. Probably the Berlin Train Station was my last historic site visit, although, it may actually have been the old Quaker Store on the Black Horse Pike! Eiland Arts Center, by the way is located in a re-purposed train station. My last piece was a group portrait of the greatest back-up singers of the old Rock and Roll period, singers like Darlene Love. My next painting will be of a building in Ocean City which was demolished in 2020, the building where my grandmother used to live on Asbury Avenue. Possibly the theme of that last few paragraphs might be that when one door closes, another opens. So I can't hike the Maurice River Bluffs anymore, but last week, I did the half hour trail of Saddler's Woods, a lovely little historic site off Cuthbert Blvd., in Haddon Township. And along with painting, I am reading a LOT: most notably at present I am reading CASTE, by Isabelle Wilkerson, a Sunday New York Times 10 Best Non-Fiction Books of 2020 selection. It deals with the racial caste system in America and the effects in our modern society, which we saw recently acted out in the unprecedented raid on the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. by Trump domestic terrorists, intent on stopping the certification of the electoral votes of the US for incoming President Joe Biden. Apparently they also intended to kidnap and possibly assassinate current Vice President Pence, if quotes and photographs (of the noose and scaffold) and videos (of them chanting Get Pence) they posted are to be believed. A large number of the groups represented White Supremacy organizations. What a start to the new year 2021. My last historic site visit post was from the visit to the train dispay at the Aerican History Museum on Andaloro Way in West Deptford. What a great little museum. I have been visiting annually since it was located in Glassboro some yeears back. I hope you can go there and visit someday soon! Happy New Year! And to anyone who sees this post, Thanks for visiting in my eleventh year on this blog!

Easy Things to Do During the Pandemic

For over 50 years, I have been a dedicated keeper of JOURNALS. Actually I began long before I started college, but during college my journal keeping really began to blossom. The most notable pre-college journal was one I inherited from my then-husband Michael as we drove around Europe for a year living in a VW Van. He began by listing what we spent money on and how many miles we had traveled. He didn't want to do it anymore, so I took it over with one line and two line descriptions of where we were - not very creative or interesting. At that time, I wasn't really a 'writer' and what I mean by that term is not someone who writes to be published, but someone who writes. After we returned home from Europe, I began to write, modestly in little address books, and pocket calendars and then in little pocket sized looseleaf notebooks, composition books and so on. In college, when I was in my late 20's I moved on to spiral bound sketch books which were mostly art based but also had lots of writing of ideas and quottions, thoughts and reviews of art shows, notes from class. Years later, the journals evolved into introspective thought writing, memories, rants and then, in an exercise to branch out, items from the outside world - news. The evolution took place because of a class I had taken where we read a history of Journal keeping. Actually I have lost and re-purchased that book many times because it had such a profound influence on me. After that, I began to buy and read other people's journals especially those of people who had lived through monumental events (think The Diary of Ann Frank). Eventually, I also began to collage from newspapers and magazines into my journals. I am sad to admit that for a certain time when I was seriously busy with too many jobs, a child to raise and a house to take care of all on my own, my journals descended into lists of chores to do and celebrations of chores done. Lately, having been retired for a long long time, my journals have become more - a respository for book reviews, ideas, recipe's, evens in my life and in the world, and PRACTICE of new things I want to try such as cartoons and simple line drawings in the style of graphic novels. I am not good at it at all which is why the privacy of a journal is so freeing, you can do something you aren't good at and enjoy it without judgement. In these times of the pandemic and social isolation, my journal has been a great source of comfort and company to me. Also, I print out pictures from my phone and my laptop and glue them in there too, sometimes for ideas for other projects, sometimes just because I like them. MY SUGGESTION TO YOU IS START A JOURNAL If you feel speechless or tongue tied, let me give you some hints: Jot down some memories, as in if you are near a holiday, remember one from the past. A memory I just added was about a childhood friend who recently died and I wrote about how we used to iceskate in the little shallow pools that formed alongside the Pennsauken Creek where we lived in a new housing development. This friend, Joe McGuigan was the best ice skater I had ever seen. He could do backward flips, jump over barrels (large trash cans) and skate like a neibhborhood Olympian. He had other telents as well, all of them athletic, and he had charisma. We all wanted to be with him and bask in the spirit of fun and adventure that he alway seemed to be enveloped in. He never left our small town and I knew nothing of his life after childhood because I moved far away and never came back, although, of course I visited. So, you see how a memory begins to evolve. You can note dreams, and if it helps you get going, note chores and things you want to get done - this doesn't have to be creative, it can evolve. Cut things out of newspapers and magazines and glue them in. Here is a good spot for a supply list: Spiral bound sketch books can usually be found at craft stores for around $5, or from amazon.com Buy three packs of glue sticks, or just one glue stick to start. Good to have on hand a packet of inexpensive smooth gliding ball point pens For greater creativity you may wish to have a pack of colored pencils. Markers bleed through the pages so if I use them, I usually glue pictures on the other side of those pages. Colored pencils are better and you can get them even at ShopRite. Most likely you already have scissors handy, keep these things on a coffee or end table near you and always at hand for easy access to get yourself into the habit. You may be surprised at how more fluent your writing comes when you enjoy the freedome of your journal. Today I want to do a Covid 19 Update. We live in momentous times, it is easy enough to find things to write about these days, including the weather! This morning I did a series of poorly drawn but, for me, fun cartoons depicting what I titled: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SNOWMAN EMPIRE! (pronouce Snowman to rhyme with Roman) I had taken some photos of snowmen that appeared after our recent snowstorm, then a giant one I saw that was a full story tall! and then a day or two later when the snow came out, they all began to melt by losing their heads. Things to cut out - recipes, book reviews so you can decide to what to buy to read, tv reviews - shows you are watching or may want to watch, and I even stoop to cutting out outfits I like from clothes catalogues that come in the mail. I used to get home goods catalogues and got lots of ideas from them. The more you do, the most you will think of to do, and your journal will become a scrapbook of your mind and your times! Happy trails, indoors and outdoors! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com Ps. A great way to start your journal is to do FIVE GRATITUDES! Think each day of 5 things you have to be grateful for - it changes your brain. It makes me think of the old toy VIEWMASTER. If you remember this toy, it was a binocular shaped viewer and you could put in a disk with images and click a side button to move from one picture to the next. Doing five gratitudes puts the grateful to be alive slide disk in place of the complaints one. There is plenty to complain about in this year of the pandemic and Trump, but there is always plenty to be grateful for as well and it is good to remind yourself each day. I tried to put some images from my journals on here but ran into problems with the import function. Still having trouble with this new format. But if you scroll back far enough through my old posts you can see an open page in Ann Whitall's diary from 1762 and the cover of my grndmother's diary from 1950's.

Reclaimed Golf Courses - hiking trails

Happy Snow Day! It is the first day of February and we are having a big snow! Maybe it is my ethnic origin, or maybe something simply individual, but I have always LOVED SNOW. When I was a teacher, I had to keep that sentiment to myself because the prevailing attitude was hate for snow. Many of my colleagues came from distant towns and were forced to use the major highways which were subject to traffic jams under the best conditions but under bad weather conditions they were hellacious! As I mentioned, I was a teacher for my whole adult life so I tend to think in terms of courses and programs. I like structure. A few years ago when I did much longer hikes than I am able to do now, a friend and I did two long programs of hiking. One was the State Guide called Passport which listed all the state parks and had a place for a sticker on each page and a place to put your notes below. That was so much fun and we discovered dozens of new parks to hike. Another one was Rails to Trails. The same hiking buddy and I did about a dozen rails to trails hikes and I am still finding them. In fact, the gallery where I have paintings on display on a regular basis, Eiland Arts in the old Merchantville Train Station building has a rails to trails right in front which I have walked many times. So here is my new Idea RECLAIMED GOLF COURSES! So far I have only found two to share with you - my favorite Cox's Creek near Cape May, NJ which I have hiked a half dozen times and which I love because the old golf cart paths making walking so easy. One of my best friends who is still able to be an avid hiker has found another Tall Pines. It was known as Maple Ridge Golf Course, and my one and only experience of it was many years ago when several colleagues and I attnded a week of in-service training there with lunch at The Eagles Nest which you might remember in connection with Ron Jaworski. I walked those paths a little on our breaks and on lunch break but I have not been back there since it has become a wildlife refuge and conservation area. The friend who was there last week wasn't terribly impressed with it, but I am eager to get there and see it for myself. So if you are looking for a hiking idea, please help yourself to mine and let me know if you find other Reclaied Golf courses. Please ue my email wrightj45@yahoo.com rather than the comments section which has become seriously polluted with robot and spam crap. Gosh how I miss the old blogspot. Oh well, if any of my old readers are still out there - Happy Valentine's Day to you! Happy Trails, Jo Ann