Holy Moly!!! Talk about Wind! Talk about Blowing Snow!
Wyoming is a whole 'nother kind of Winter. Its almost as flat as the Great Plains. The wind blows anything in its way. At 35 to 50 mph. Constantly. In Winter it blows the snow. You drive through it. Fortunately it is usually at ground level, but not always.
No pictures today; not much of what I would call scenic.
So I'm going to review the other thing I do on my road trips: read and listen to books.
Audiobooks:
Michael Punke, The Revenant. The movie is now out, but the book is still special enough to be read or listened to. Its a rough book. It is based on a mountain man who actually existed and relates events that either actually occurred or exist in legend. I liked it a lot.
Robert Littell, The Stalin Epigram. Another fictionalization of a real life. In this case, its the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who was arrested by the Soviet political police in 1934. At the time, the political police were still relying on extracting confessions that the accused recited in public show trials. Within a couple of years, Stalin and his henchmen had dispensed with confessions and merely held trials in which prosecutors recited accusations as statements of fact that were used to convict and condemn the accused. The novel's centerpiece is a poem that Mandelstam recited that was derogatory of Stalin. But the author indicates that what really infuriated Stalin was that even after torture and exile, he could not prevail on Mandelstam to recite a poem in which he sincerely complemented Stalin. It was a bit tedious.
James Carlos Blake, The House of Wolfe, A Border Noir. This is one of a serial on the Wolfe family, a criminal enterprise in Texas and Mexico that had its fictional start with a sea captain turned pirate who was supposedly hanged in Vera Cruz in the 1840s. This episode involves the kidnapping of a female member of the Texas Wolfe clan in Mexico and her recovery due to the combined efforts of the Texas and Mexico branches of the family. Smuggling and violence are the hallmarks of the Wolfes, and Blake's books are a fast read (or listen) and a lot of fun.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer. I am currently listening to this audiobook. The narrator is a South Vietnamese army officer who served as chief of staff to a general who was head of the secret police. Both are flown out of Saigon in 1975 just before the North's takeover of the city. The narrator has been a VC plant within the South's secret police and he is ordered to continue his surveillance and reports on the general's machinations in the USA. That's it so far.
Books on Kindle:
Martin Lynch, Mining in World History. I read this as a followup of my trip with Jeff last November to Southeast Arizona and Southwest New Mexico. We visited-observed-toured four open-pit copper mines. The book was every bit as interesting as the title makes it sound, but I feel I learned a lot.
State of Terror: The War Against ISIS. A compilation of Washington Post articles on ISIS over the past year.
Currently reading:
Michael McCarthy, Ashes Under Water: The SS Eastland and the Shipwreck That Shook America.
John Grisham, Gray Mountain.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle.
Peter Annin, The Great Lakes Water Wars.
Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings: A Novel. the 2015 Man Booker Prize winner
Day 10 mileage: 395
Cumulative mileage: 3,165
