Email from John

I got permission from John to post an e-mail of his here:

I've had an interesting year of reading, although I'm
out of the reading mode until it's not nice enough to
do something rational. I'm reading quite an
interesting fishing book, well, make that "fly
fishing" book, called, "Rivers of Shadow, Rivers of
Sun" by Norm Zeigler. Not much fishing about it,
really. Sort of a "Blue Highways" sort of thing
centered around finding off-the-beaten-path of famous
European/Scandinavian rivers. Reading it is like
sitting over a glass of wine in a small European cafe
talking about people, rivers and the fish that we aim
to catch and sometimes do. This is a nice contrast to
"Footnotes from a Catastrophy" and some of the other
environmental glasnost books that seem to find their
way into my hands. Sharon dropped "Marley and Me" on
me and it was a nice flight book to and from Boston,
but in the end I couldn't finish the book. This winter
I went through a rash of Annie Proulx books after a
seatmate on a flight to Boston gave me one of her
books. "Close Range." "Accordian Crimes." A couple of
others. A very good writer with great
characterization. My brother gave me a Bush Attack
that I sometimes will read a chapter of before bed,
although there is so little I find either amusing or
even funny about the man, so the work usually bores
me. It's like reading about the one guy who is always
trying to crowd into a table of people he thinks are
friends, and is not intelligent enough to realize they
find he and his jokes stupid rather than funny. JGW