love like light

1. I am currently on an island, the Isle of Wight.

2. Today I finished reading We Bought an Island, which I LOVED. It's a memoir of two sisters who bought an island off the Cornwall coast in the 1960s and turned it into (basically) an artists' retreat. This book is focused on them finding the island and moving in, and all the people they meet. It genuinely made me laugh out loud several times, to the point where it's coming home with me because I know I'll want to reread it later. Luckily I have the small pocket-sized paperback version; if I have to I can just put it in my coat pocket.

I desperately want to read the sequel, which talks about their life on the island after moving in, but I may have to resign myself to reading the PDF on Archive.org as the local used bookshop doesn't have a copy. I can always order one on eBay if I want to later, too.

3. While looking for Tales From Our Cornish Island (that's the sequel) at the local used bookshop, I found a different book about living on an island: Herm, Our Island Home, which I of course bought. This one is about a family (6 kids, 2 parents) living on an island 3 miles from Guernsey in the Channel Islands, around the same time period as the sisters on their island, actually.

4. I enjoy reading about people on islands, and I enjoy visiting islands. If I were going to live on an island, I'd prefer a larger one. But then I've never been enamored with small-town life, tbh. I prefer mid-sized places.

5. I re-watched Muppet Treasure Island the other day and then read Robert Louis Stevenson's fascinating Wikipedia page; I'd no idea that he'd written travel memoirs, nor spent the last years of his life writing from and about Samoa (an island nation).

6. Other islands I've been to: the UK (of course), Madeira Island, São Miguel Island, Barbados, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, Manhattan Island.

7. Private artificial islands creep me out, especially when they're populated by billionaires. Public artificial islands are, I suppose, fine.

8. I just found this Wikipedia list of fictional islands and it's made me think back to how many of my favorite books as a kid were set on islands, or involved islands, most of them only lightly inhabited. They do make for interesting story settings...

9. "Let's all go to Gullah Gullah Island!"