The number eight in Chinese brings good fortune, I learned from the scheduling of the Olympic Games. That is why they began last week on the eighth day of the eighth month in the year 2008.

I am not Chinese, I am not an athlete and I live on the Vineyard, not in China. So I should not be surprised, I suppose, that little good has happened to me since I turned the calendar page to August.

Ellen Liman has long had a love affair with Martha’s Vineyard — in particular with Vineyard beaches, Vineyard Sound and Vineyard flowers. But her love affair is more than that of the usual seasonal visitor. She’s been coming to the Island for 22 years. Each day she takes out her oil paints and canvases and, in vivid colors, reproduces for Island walls and the walls of Vineyard-loving off-Islanders what she sees in nature.

THE BISHOP’S DAUGHTER: A Memoir. By Honor Moore. Illustrated. W.W. Norton & Co. Inc. 354 pages. $25.95 hardcover.

In the 1970s, the late Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore Jr. was a Chilmark seasonal visitor. He came to the Island after the death of his first wife, Jenny McKean, and his marriage to Brenda Hughes Eagle who had a Chilmark home. Now his eldest daughter by his first marriage has written a memoir about her own life and the life of her illustrious father.

Remarkable Americans: The Washburn Family. By Kerck Kelsey. Illustrated. Tilbury House Publishers. 402 pages. $25.95.

Since the 1950s, the Washburn name has been a familiar one in Edgartown, with the late Stanley Washburn living on South Water street in summer and C. Langhorne Washburn summering on Pease’s Point Way. This fact-filled volume tells the story of their 19th-century forebears from northern Maine.

Now that spring is here, I am willing to forget winter, but in March I was longing for it. This past Vineyard winter for me was neither cold nor snowy enough. So early last month, desperate for genuine winter, I packed my snow boots and ski pants and anorak and headed for northwestern Canada.