I am really enjoying wandering through life. No, I mean I am enjoying Donna Leon’s short book, a memoir, called Wandering Through Life. It’s in the biography section of the Pine Bush Area Public Library. It is not a big, thick book like most biographies. It is Donna Leon’s second book of musings about her life and it’s a thin book with very small pages. In the non-fiction section, in
history about various countries, you will find her other book of musings, My Venice and Other Essays. I tell you now, you must read them both.

It sounds like she is talking to herself, and very interesting she is, too. I especially liked her chapter about her mother, called “Moo.” Her mother was named Mildred, and a compassionate cousin changed it to “Aunt Moo” and that was who she was, ever after.

Moo loved flowers. “Then there were the gardens, which she created anywhere we lived…She wanted to see an ocean of flowers from every window of every house we ever lived in, and she
managed it.”

Donna Leon’s parents also both loved books, and there is a chapter called “Reading.” In her murder mysteries, set in modern-day Venice, Paola and Guido Brunetti are both avid readers. Paola can disappear so completely into the book she is reading that it is hard for her to surface to do mundane things, like remember to cook supper. Leon’s latest murder mystery, A Refiner’s
Fire, is on Pine Bush Library’s New Book Shelf.

Another chapter of “Wandering” is “Gotthard” in which Leon is on a train from Italy to Switzerland, and is approaching the Gotthard Tunnel. She always expects something awful to happen, mid-tunnel, and it never does. “I do read about the cinema, and thus am familiar with the burning buildings, the sinking ships, the giant crabs that will inherit the earth after some sort of nuclear disaster… There is always something nasty lurking in the woodshed. Or the tunnel.”

I like Donna Leon’s sense of humor, and her writing style. She is fun to read, whether she is writing a murder mystery or she is just Wandering Through Life.