Needed a Jumpstart

I just wasn't getting around to picking up Moby Dick. My head wasn't in the right place. I needed a contemporary connection to get back to it, so I did a search for "Cape Cod" at my local library and turned up this memoir, The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home by George Howe Colt. I think it's going to do the trick. Here's a paragraph from early on in the book:

We lug our bags to the thick green oak door. Instinctively throwing my shoulder against the top while kicking the bottom where the door sticks, I open it wide. Inside, we are enveloped by an unmistakable smell, one that might be difficult for even the most expert chemist to break down, but that seems to be composed, in various measures, of salt, wind, dust, sunlight, moonlight, sand, pine, mildew, mothballs, leather, old books, disintegrating bricks, and dead bluebottle flies. It is a smell so evocative and precious, so irresistibly redolent of both life and decay, that I wonder why it has never been bottled and sold as a perfume.