Winter reading, 2015

After leaving a great job in January, 2015, I am having trouble finding the time to read. My new job leaves me exhausted. Midnight to 8 am schedule leaves me asleep all day just to go back and do it again. I have re-read Murder at Hazelmoor by Agatha Christie, 1931. I like to read this when the winter turns nasty and cold, especially if we are in the middle of a snow storm here in southwestern Ohio. The winter is hanging on with this sub zero temperatures and my cozy read comforts me. Another book I read this winter was "Berlin Underground" by Ruth Andreas-Friedrich about the resistance by the Germans from 1938-1945, especially her small group of saboteurs. From the book jacket, "Mrs. Friedrich's group was the only non-Communist resistance group in Berlin to be recognized by the Russians. They had already been 'screened,' and given a clean bill of health by the American." This book really gives a clear picture of war on the city's citizens and the chaos that ensues at the end of the war. I am  in the middle of the sequel, "Battleground Berlin: Diaries 1945-1948." There seemed to be little hope that things would ever improve, but most problems stemmed from the precarious alignment between the Allies and what they were trying to accomplish. The Russians and the Americans were busy shooting at each other at various skirmishes many nights and made life very difficult to continue with good faith. Many efforts were an example of one step forward and two steps backward. There isn't a good track record of life to return for the innocents after a war. A sad story, but a record of many brave attempts to build a new political order out of rubble, and still this continues. I heard today that there is a effort to re-take Mosul, I can only imagine the misery that continues. All three of these books have been good to read, and for that I am grateful.

reading

I am one of those people who read more than one book at a time, I don't know when I started it, but it just happens, I don't have my book with me, I pick up another, and pretty soon I have a book started in each room of the house and I drive my husband crazy with all my books all over. I like to read anything; magazine essays, short stories, or a chapter in a book I read two years ago. If I really like the way it is written, I'll read it over, maybe just in parts. Sometimes I'm in a mood, nostalgic is my main mood. To a gentler time, an older time in history, maybe it safe for me to go there because it is past and can't scare me with its terrors. I can sympathize with the characters, and think about what it was like, but it not my world. I don't want to read about people who commit mass murders in 2009 and their ilk, I don't want to frighten myself anymore than I already do by watching the news. I have an old book on my shelf that I am ashamed to say probably read four or five times, and still it draws me in and I like to visit the setting, the time, the winter snowy night, the blizzard feeling of closed roads and winds swirling at the windows and whistling through the grooves of the bricks or stone walls of the house. This book is "Murder at Hazelmoor" by Agatha Christie and is also known as "The Sittaford Mystery" and the date is 1931. Right smack in the middle of that wonderful time between the wars known as "the Golden age of Mystery novels" taken to be the period between 1913 and the start of World War II. Funny, I thought that it started after World War I, I stand corrected. Any way, Hazelmoor is a home I think, where murder has taken place, and it is perfect for a winter night, and I like to picture myself back in the sixties, on a chair close up to the blazing fire, in my home as a child. I loved those fires, back before we knew all the heat was going up the chimney, as the living room heated, and the back bedrooms got more chilly. My link in the title of this post is to the website Resources for School Libraries. You'll find a whole list of mystery authors.