Having moved, one of the things that we have been doing is unpacking books that had been on shelves in our old house. Most of them were probably not read, or least all the way through. I just picked up one entitled “Reading People” by Jo-Ellan Dimitrius and Mark Mazzarella. t had been marked at page 21 – out of 271. Perhaps, we never got very far as Jo-Ellan is famous for picking jurors in celebrated cases. I don’t ever recall having to pick a juror nor has The Blonde in the house. Possibly, we thought we might someday, but so far we haven’t which probably limits our necessity to ever do so. Besides I am always suspicious of books with two authors. You never know who wrote what, or if the first one listed handed over a bunch of notes to the second one and said, “Here is all I know, you write the book and let me know when you are done.” It is a worry even if they handled things with great cooperation. You know, like writing every other chapter.
Another book that didn’t have a great deal of wear on it was “500 Brickwall Solutions to Genealogy Problems”. This one didn’t have any authors listed. It just indicated that it was from some publishers. I just glanced at a couple of pages and saw a section on “serendipity and hard work”. I have always been interested in serendipity, but not so much the hard work that goes with genealogy. However, the Blonde does. She was searching for years for her grandparents who came from Ireland. She did find the ones from England fairly quickly. Her grandmother came from the aristocratic city of Leeds while her grandfather came from Dudley. We even found some folks in Dudley whose parents had bought some commercial property from her great grandfather. However, she never said nay on the Irish connection and finally was successful with the help of a knowledgeable friend.
A book that we probably did look through is “Aunt Erma’s Cope Book” by Erma Bombeck. You will immediately notice that this book only has one author.
Many of you may recall Erma Bombeck who used to write a newspaper column and was very funny in her comments. She is lucky in that she came along when she did as there does not seem to be much of a market for funny commentators – although many today are – unintentionally! I do recall the days when you read the paper to relax and not get agitated at all the awful things that will happen to us. However, I guess at my age that I would just as soon not be so cognizant of what our grandkids and possibly kids face. We have a great country and I hope that we continue in that manner despite being told by some that we don’t. There, of course, is always the prima facia fact that everyone wants to come here. However, I digress, we are talking about books..
There is one book that I did read entitled “Fermat’s Enigma” by Simon Singh. I even have a note from him in response to a letter I wrote him. It involved an epic quest to solve the world’s greatest mathematical problem. A Frenchman named Fermat posted (no not on Facebook, this was the 17th century) a problem and indicated that he had solved it, but did not explain how. (Not very nice in my opinion). All sorts of mathematicians for 350 years tried to solve it. One committed suicide over it and another died in a duel. I’m not certain if the duel was with another mathematician. Mathematicians can get pretty testy as is well known. It was finally solved by Andrew Wiles from Princeton. It is really a good book to read in the evening while lying in bed.
Now the real problem with these books is – where the heck are we going to put them!
Barry Evans is a Villager and writes about Life in The Villages for Villages-News.com.