. . . edited to GREEN

for ST. PATRICK'S DAY. Thanks to photo-editing software, this formerly rusted old door is now in compliance with the sentiment of the day. Happy day to all my Irish friends and relatives. . . the McManuses, the Kelleys, et al. It is raining and cold here, so I'm thinking of the McManuses and hoping they can keep dry in the Topeka parade.

*****

I just added another book to my reading list, and I noticed a trend lately: I'm reading historical fiction, combining present day stories with tales of the past. I know I don't read "the good books", the classics; however, I have read a lot of them (including Ulysses which is on a lot of peoples' TBR list). When I went back to school a few years ago, studying for an English major, I did read the required texts, and found that I enjoyed them a great deal. I had never read Huckleberry Finn, or any Virginia Woolf, imagine that. During my twenties, after I quit school for the first time, and while I was working as a secretary in an insurance firm, I read everything indiscriminately: anything and everything by Herman Hesse, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Ayn Rand, Dos Pasos, and the list goes on -- auto-didactic (there, I wanted to use that word.)There was no rhyme or reason to any of it, and I had no one with which to discuss these books. I know now that I learn and understand better with the direction of a good instructor and the participation of other people in the class. I have on my shelf right now Seneca, Letters from a Stoic; Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays; Saint Augustine's Confessions; Aristotle's The Politics; and the rest of the Western Civ reading list. Will I read these soon? No, probably not until I take the class, if I ever do. I will stick to The Russian Concubine and others like that, sort of history-lite. "So many books, so little time."