Rue De Paris, Rainy Day (Gustave Caillebotte)
#92
Walking the streets of Paris with my wife,
Feeling her heart through her hand on my arm
(It is April and we’re here for a week),
We celebrate twenty five years, a life
Of mutual shelter beneath the storm,
Sharing a blue umbrella as we seek
Out the old soul behind the city’s charms,
What we’ve found in each other countless times
When the sun has broken through and we shine.
She gasped when she saw the Eiffel Tower,
Her wonder more thrilling than its power,
While the Winged Victory’s arms were not missed,
Because she sought to entwine hers with mine,
And in front of Rodin’s The Kiss, we kissed.
Note: This is one of more than 100 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.
aims to take you back to the glory days of punch, when it was brewed from spirits, spices and not-too-clean water. Our sanitation has improved and so has our taste, which leaves me eager to try some of these recipes.
by Paul Doiron is the story of Maine game warden Mike Bowditch. He’s been sent into exile, Down East, a remote outpost on the Canadian border. He’s lonely, frustrated, and not making friends. Game wardens aren’t popular with the hunters in the area, making it a very tough assignment.
. There is a certain lyrical quality to it that I appreciated, and I found that quite interesting, mixed as it was with a tale of murder and mayhem.
pays homage to those characters while he pokes fun at science fiction conventions. 
would make a pretty decent spy novel. The problem is, he tries to make it more than that. He tries to add a romance that just doesn’t work; his female characters are painful to read. And there should be a law: that he never writes another sex scene. The other problem for me was that this was an audiobook, and the reader, Rupert Degas, did not enhance the experience of this book.
by E.T.A. Hoffmann and illustrated by Maurice Sendak is wonderfully written, perfect for some of the older kids in my extended family and it definitely made it onto the Christmas list.
is the fourth book in Eric van Lustbader’s Jack McClure/Alli Carson series. These are spy novels with a bit of a supernatural twist. Jack McClure, Department of Defense special agent, has some curious abilities. He’s dyslexic, which has to be a detriment for an agent, but his unusual way of thinking lets him see things others miss. He can solve puzzles that require thinking not just outside the box, but inside, outside, under, over and through the box. Occasionally, when things are particularly tough, he gets some help from his daughter, Emma.
