READING THE WEATHER

Car moved to higher and less muddy ground, supplies stowed, everything battenable has been battened.

Now, if history holds true, we’ll get a bit of rain and no more. Which would be fine with me.

But it looks and, more tellingly, feels like snow outside. It’s still early evening and the snow’s not due until midnight or later.

And that means a few more hours to think about…snow day reading.

Early to mid-winter snow day reads tend to focus on fiction, generally big novels that I can sink into for hours at a time, confident that if the snows falls deeply enough and the temperatures follow suit, I’ll have several snow-read days in a row, and with them the possibility of several large novels.

But after mid-February or so here in southern Virginia, snows disappear quickly. We may see the upper 60s by the weekend, so I’ll be reading shorter, catching up on sf magazines and a couple of tight thrillers from the 50s and 60s (a Westlake and a McBain at the top of the stack).

And also, again because it’s mid-February, at least some of tomorrow’s reading time will go to seed catalogs and the literature of gardening. But which literature?

Time to scan the shelves for possibilities.

Before the snow starts to fall.