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My Family and other Animals by Gerald Durrell is really a fun and funny book especially because it reminds me of hiking with my hubby where the dog and I were stopping every few feet to wait while he turned over a log and filled up specimen bottles with critters.
For many years I had containers in my freezer with insects in them. I made him promise no snakes before we got married and he kept that promise, thank goodness.
Several people here recommended that I buy this book and a bunch voted for me to read it first from my TBR pile and I thank you very much. The last part of the book was particularly funny and had me in stitches because I could picture the whole thing.
My readers know how much I love beautiful settings so I will share a few from the book.
pgs. 66, 67
The nights were still and cool, with a moon so fragile it barely freckled the sea with silver points. The dawns were pale and translucent until the sun rose, mist-wrapped, like a gigantic silkworm cocoon, and washed the island with a delicate bloom of gold dust.
With March came the spring, and the island was flower-filled...
Waxy yellow crocuses appeared in great clusters, bubbling out among the tree roots and tumbling down the banks. Under the myrtles, the grape-hyacinths lifted buds like magenta sugar-drops, and the gloom of the oak thickets was filled with the dim smoke of a thousand blue day-irises.
pgs. 124, 125
Then suddenly the moon, enormous, wine-red, edged herself over the fretted battlement of mountains, and threw a straight, blood-red path across the dark sea. The owls appeared now, drifting from tree to tree as silently as flakes of soot, hooting in astonishment as the moon rose higher and higher, turning to pink, then gold, and finally riding in a nest of stars, like a silver bubble.
pgs. 136, 137
First of all there were just two or three green specks, sliding smoothly through the trees, winking regularly. But gradually more and more appeared, until parts of the olive grove were lit with a weird green glow. Never had we seen so many fireflies congregated in one spot...Glittering streams of them flew out over the bay, swirling over the water, and then, right on cue, the porpoises appeared, swimming in line into the bay, rocking rhythmically through the water, their backs as if painted with phosphorus.
In the center of the bay they swam round, diving and rolling, occasionally leaping high in the air and falling back into a conflagration of light. With the fireflies above and the illuminated porpoises below it was a fantastic sight. We could even see the luminous trails beneath the surface where the porpoises swam in fiery patterns across the sandy bottom, and when they leaped high in the air the drops of emerald glowing water flicked from them and you could not tell if it was phosphorescence or fireflies you were looking at.
pgs. 157, 158, 159
Winter came to the island gently as a rule. The sky was still clear, the sea blue and calm, and the sun warm. But there would be an uncertainty in the air. The gold and scarlet leaves that littered the countryside in great drifts whispered and chuckled among themselves, or took experimental runs from place to place, rolling like colored hoops among the trees...
The whole air was one of expectancy, like a vast audience waiting for the curtain to go up. Then one morning you threw back the shutters and looked down over the olive trees, across the blue bay to the russet mountains of the mainland, and became aware that winter had arrived, for each mountain peak would be wearing a tattered skull-cap of snow. Now the air of expectancy grew almost hourly.
...For a week or so the wind played with the island, patting it, stroking it, humming to itself among the bare branches. Then there was a lull, a few days' strange calm; suddenly, when you least expected it, the wind would be back. But it was a changed wind, a mad, hooting, bellowing wind that leaped down on the island and tried to blow it into the sea...The sea turned a deep blue, almost black, and became crusted with foam.
...This is what the dead leaves had whispered about, this is what they had practiced for; exultantly they rose in the air and danced, whirligiging about, dipping, swooping, falling exhausted when the wind tired of them and passed on. Rain followed the wind...
The rivers up in the Albanian mountains became swollen and showed white teeth in a snarl as they rushed down to the sea...
Gradually all these veins burst, and the sea changed from blue to yellow-brown; then the wind tore at the surface, piling the water into ponderous waves, like great tawny lions with white manes that stalked and leaped upon the shore.
pg. 235
...then we walked slowly back to the beach, where the fire Spiro had built pulsed and glowed like an enormous chrysanthemum among the ghostly white lilies. Spiro, having speared three large fish, was roasting them on a grid...
The moon rose above the mountains, turned the lilies to silver except where the flickering flames illuminated them with a flush of pink. The tiny ripples sped over the moonlit sea and breathed with relief as they reached shore at last. Owls started to chime in the trees, and in the gloomy shadows fireflies gleamed as the flew, their jade-green misty lights pulsing on and off.
...we looked back...The lilies were like a snow-field under the moon, and the dark backcloth of olives was pricked with the light of fireflies. The fire we had built, stamped and ground under foot before we left, glowed like a patch of garnets at the edge of the flowers.
pg. 270
Outside, the island was striped and patched in black and silver by moonlight. Far down in the dark cypress trees the owls called to each other comfortingly. The sky looked as black and soft as mole-skin covered with a delicate dew of stars. The magnolia tree loomed vast over the house, its branches full of white blooms, like a hundred miniature reflections of the moon, and their thick, sweet scent hung over the veranda languorously, the scent that was an enchantment luring you out into the mysterious, moonlit countryside.
Along with Gerry we get to meet and explore a profusion of life:
pg. 23
Carpenter bees, like furry, electric-blue bears, zig-zagged among the flowers, growling fatly and busily. Humming bird hawk-moths, sleek and neat, whipped up and down the paths with a fussy efficiency, pausing occasionally on speed-misty wings to lower a slender proboscis into a bloom.
I highly recommend this book. It will lift your spirits, I promise.
I also bought his book Birds, Beasts and Relatives to start soon.
What books do you enjoy that lift your spirits as you read?
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Write On! tl;dr
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/20/1682506/-Write-On-tl-dr
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www.dailykos.com/...
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