Tuesday night, it's getting dark outside.

I have in front of me a copy of Die Pulfer von Rüeggisberg it's a family history of my paternal grandmother's lineage in Switzerland. It's a little over 110 pages long and goes back to about 1530 to trace the history of the Pulfers. My grandmother is mentioned in one sentence as is her marriage to my grandfather. That's the end of the line as they only cover paternal lines. It's in German and I have some trouble reading it but I did find that my great-great grandfather was a milker who had about 15 kids and whose grandfather was a wainwright who had 17 kids. I think his wife had 17 kids, her first when she was 17 the last at age 45, all but two surviving until adulthood. I'll need to go back and read the document a little more carefully. Today if you meet someone with 4 kids it's seems like a lot.

I've also been reading the Dante Club by Matthew Pearl for my book club at work. It's been a chore. The prose is wooden, the characters talking in "19th century talk". It's fiction but based on historical characters, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell among others. It's a bit much, there's a brief encounter with Emerson, they employ the assistance of the famous geologist Aggasiz. I almost expect Napoleon III to come crashing into the plot in a hot air balloon errantly blown in from France. I've also been getting this bizarre imagery of the Monty Python cast playing the characters, Michael Palin as Longfellow, John Cleese as Oliver Wendell Holmes. I have trouble with the mixing of fact and fiction as someone might have trouble with mixing of foods on the dinner plate. Still, I like the idea of reading a novel a month as otherwise I would endlessly read news articles from Yahoo!News, New York Times and the Washington Post.