I was planning to make a Boston Athenaeum/Boston Public Library trip tomorrow, but the high-wind warnings are going to keep me at home. The weather people have posted warnings to people who are going to try walking about downtown Boston tomorrow. I think I'll wait til Monday. I/m not messing around with gales of hurricane force while surrounded by tall buildings--I'd end up in a tesseract for sure. C'mon you Madeleine L'Engle fans, remember that one?

Until then, I've got From the Ruins of the Reich:Germany 1945-1949 by Douglas Botting to read. The first few chapters are full of deeply grim stories from the end of the war and the first few postwar months. Appalling chaos, brutal starvation, violence. Millions of people with nowhere to go and exhausted, war-weary soldiers to police them all. A recipe for disaster.

On a brighter note, I've turned to Almost French:Love and a New Life in Paris by the Australian journalist Sarah Turnbull for my work-out reading. Light-hearted, charming, not deep (underline this), a welcome respite from postwar Europe. So far Frederic, Frederique?, the Parisian she's mad about, seems so crazy (he's into highly staged practical jokes, for one thing) that it's a puzzle how she ever connected with him, but it does make for an entertaining read.