14 June 2020> Speaking of NW, we biked Utah + Nebraska aves NW this morning... Northwest DC is a far cry from Zadie Smith's NW London... + strange that the U.K./hardcover edition has a diamond on the cover, looks more like DC than London. The majority of D.C. lays in the NW quadrant of the diamond...

... including where we live + Utah + Nebraska aves. Utah is also a far cry from D.C., the hole point of our Microcosmic D.C. project (only 7 states to go!), specially in this homebound state we can travel there vicariously + reflect on these states. We don't got much experience w/ Utah, weave bin there a few times in our field geology days, or climbing in Moab, or hiking in Bryce + Zion a few times, including in 1992, whose journal we recently transcribed. Nebraska we don't have much experience with either, except when we lived in the Black Hills of South Dakota (1994) we wasn't far from Nebraska + probly passed thru a few times (we haven't transcribed those journals yet). We tackled Utah + Nebraska avenues by bike again since our heal is still heeling + also cuz they're pretty far way out Northwest. Utah runs up thru Chevy Chase to the border w/ Maryland. Then we looped back down Nebraska which runs almost down to the Potomac. Then we looped home thru Georgetown.

All pretty suburban + not much to write home about, except we saw dozen of rabbits (lots of lawns in them parts) + riding along Reservoir road thru Georgetown we saw the massive embassies of Germany + France, to take our microcosmic wandering to an international level.

Not a whole lot of luck w/ book boxes, tho we did score a copy of The Three Musketeers (we talked about Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Christo in the last post). Speaking of which, here's today's new batch of books destined for our liebury boox for Black Books Matter:

• In the House of the Interpreter by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o—read on the plane from Amsterdam to Nairobi, 2016.
• The Native Hurricane by Chigozie John Obioma—read in Mali in 2009
• The Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa—read in Uganda in 2007
• Harriet Tubman by Ann Petry—we haven't read Ann Petry so got a few of her books including this 1, not realizing it's a children's book, so we're just putting it straight out in our boox.

+ yesterday we read Buck Studies by Douglas Kearney.

We read The Black Automaton a few years ago + had been meaning to check out other stuff of his, especially the visual stuff we dig, these from Buck Studies: