Where Light Takes its Color From the Sea

Little pieces of wisdom can do a lot for one's view of the world. "Where Light Takes Its Color from the Sea: A California Notebook" is a collection of essays on the world written by James Houston as he let it all sink in while vacationing in Santa Cruz, California. Poignant, witty, and entertaining, "Where Light Takes Its Color from the Sea" is insightful and highly recommended.

Santa Cruz writer James D. Houston has collected a wonderful set of essays, short stories, vignettes and reflections about the Golden State in this just-released volume from Heyday Books in Berkeley. Known for his recent historical fiction about the Donner Party (Snow Mountain Passage) and the cross-cultural currents between California and Hawaii (Bird of Another Heaven), "Where the Light Takes Its Color from the Sea" will introduce the reader to a more personal side of this lifelong observer of the California scene. Why he became a writer; how California has affected his writing (and that of Raymond Carver, Wallace Stegner and John Steinbeck); his take, sometimes in satirical form, on the crazy contradictions of living in a place at once so beautiful and so maddeningly inconvenient and expensive. How even the light, which does indeed take its color from the sea around here, works on you, tempers your certainties, enchants you, and convinces you never to leave. A book for the two categories (in my thinking) of Americans: those who live here and wonder about this place they call home, and those who've always imagined being here. Either way, buy it, read it and learn from forty years' worth of thought & musing from this native son of the Golden West.