I have plenty books.

Instagram Round-Up
Mostly stuff from or at work--including a 1960s? hotplate and The Crucial Decade cover by Ben Shahn.
The little yellow bug is part of an end cap display by Ass't Man--he's a graphic designer/illustrator (so never worked in a workplace like this!),
and when he has time he sets up great displays.

                     The girlettes use my new Croc shoes for speedboats.

Part of another display by Ass't Man:

An old friend I've recently reconnected with mentioned that she makes 100K/year. How awesome is that?
We should all be paid a living wage along those lines.

A different friend taught grade school to poor kids in Hawaii --mostly indigenous Hawaiians. ( The traditional name of the Hawaiian people is Kānaka Maoli.) This friend always quoted a little boy who had written,
"I have plenty money, I have plenty toys."

I always related to that. I'm not poor; I have plenty books!

Hey, what about that Wuthering Heights . . .? 
Have you read it???
I hadn't.
I was expecting a romance, but this story is insane. I had no idea! What it is, is a bunch of disturbed people trapped together.
It's compelling reading, like Maenads on the Moors: "Let's tear each other apart with our bare hands!"

Also, having only seen photos from movie adaptations, I hadn't realized that Heathcliff is what we'd now call a Person of Color.
He's called “a dark skinned gypsy, in aspect”, or "a little Lascar" (19th-century sailors from India).

The sympathetic narrator Nelly Dean encourages Heathcliff to think of himself as the son of a Chinese emperor and an Indian princess.
Mostly, though, he's treated like dirt, so there's that angle too--how humiliation drives Heathcliff to violent revenge.

But he's also deranged in his own right. And Catherine and her Earnshaw family are obviously seriously mentally ill.
 

Below: books from work and library, piled on couch where I'm house sitting.

I liked the post-apocalyptic Mockingbird (Walter Tevis, 1980) and Earth Abides. (George Stewart, 1949).

Mockingbird is about an AI in a world where humans are entirely dependent on drugs and robots and can no longer procreate. It deals with some of the same material in the recent Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells.

Earth Abides is more like Max Brooks's Devolution--how do people deal with the loss of modern tech?

Next up: I, Robot.

Gotta finish Wuthering Heights first though.
It's disturbing, but it's the best argument ever that authors don't have to have wide (or even any) life experience to write stories that knock your socks off.