But one of the books I read last year was The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald, which was alternatively interesting, funny, depressing, and startlingly racist.
I knew Betty MacDonald for her Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series, which I loved as a child. But she was probably even better known for her memoir about struggling to run a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula in the late 1920s. The Egg and I became wildly popular, spawned several copycat titles, and many films (most of them about Ma and Pa Kettle, sort of precursors to the Beverly Hillbillies).
I have trouble deciding how much I actually like the book, but the setting of the book is close to where I live now. There's an egocentric delight in reading good descriptions of local scenery.
After church on Easter, we took a drive.
And here's a view from Egg and I Road. (We weren't sure where exactly the farm had been located, but here's a farm that makes me think of Betty MacDonald's house huddled at the feet of the mountains.)
Then we turned onto Egg and I Ridge Road.
And then we were done being vaguely literary and we went here:
Do you know what's inside the giant metal fish? If you guessed "most of creation," you'd be correct.
