I’m getting an inordinate amount of joy this week from watching it snow on a volcano in Iceland. You can see tiny people sometimes, and a number of helicopters, and in general a very dramatic landscape that makes me miss Iceland, which is one of my favorite places I have ever been.

Someday we will travel again. And until that time, we have webcams and books.

I see the last thing I told you folks about was American Nations. After that, I read a Donna Andrews cozy mystery, Owl Be Home For Christmas, in which her harried protagonist is once more the only organized person in a carnival of the absurd. These feel like going home for the holidays, if your family wasn’t toxic as hell.

I read Karl Marlantes’ What it is Like to Go to War (does what it says on the box), a book I have been meaning to get around to for ages. I think it’s a really valuable piece of work in how it talks about PTSD and survivor trauma and how poorly we as a society prepare warriors for killing and also how poorly we re-integrate them into civilian life. (How poorly we are set up to re-integrate anybody who has been institutionalized into civilian life.)