I tend to read books round-robin style with lots of books in the round-robin. I used to try to discipline myself to stick with it one book at a time, but I found that I didn't get the most out of my reading that way. I do better reading a good chunk out of this book and then switching to something unrelated. At the moment I have lots of books whirling around in my home. This particular mix is turning out to be very pleasurable, so I'm sharing it with you.
Up Against the Ivy Wall I had to special request this at the library, but it's terrific research for my novel. The book takes you through the protests at Columbia in 1968. The book is written by student journalists who were attending Columbia at the time and some of whom participated in the protests.
Why Students Rebel This is another period book by a middle-aged reporter about the Columbia protest. This book is more analytical and a tad snide. I'm enjoying contrasting it with the student reporter version. He also takes a bit of a character driven approach. Handy for the novelist.
Silent Spring I've always wanted to read this, and it was on the shelf at the library. I was right to pursue it. The book is alarming, but also elegant. Marvelous propaganda for a good cause.
A Theater of Envy Rene Girard's ideas are haunting me, so when I saw this book was available through interlibrary loan I couldn't resist. It's a combo of Shakespeare and Girard's ideas. Very interesting.
Month by Month Gardening I have this beautiful garden I didn't plant, and I need to know what to do with it and when. So far this book has me hopeful that I can get on top of it all.
Botany in a Day The kids and I are studying botany this summer, so I got this resource to expand my knowledge of the subject. The author is certainly enthusiastic about plants. His certitude that all this is so easy I can master it in a day is bracing, though unlikely to materialize.
The Botany Coloring Book I thought this was just going to be a simple coloring book like the human anatomy coloring book, but instead it's three times as long and full of fascinating information.
The Wholeness of a Broken Heart OK, I whizzed through this one in a day and a half, but I just finished it and it was so good. I'm going to buy a copy of this for each of my daughter's twenty-first birthdays. The insight this author offers into the mother/daughter relationship is priceless.
Slouching Toward Bethlehem I was flying through this, but I realized I was going to come to the end and I'm enjoying it too much to rush to the finish. The essays by Joan Didion written around the time my novel is set are period bound, but I find that period so rich it is almost timeless.
Say Goodbye to Whining, Complaining, and Bad Attitudes...in You and Your Kids One of those hint, hint gifts from my mom. It isn't intellectually challenging, but I'm having one of those "I just can't concentrate" fugues when I try to read it. Nevertheless, I keep picking it up because I can't stand my own whining. Maybe my mom should have read it when I was a kid? Hmmmm. :)
That's it mostly. I futz around with magazines and such, but I try to stay focused on the books when I can grab time around everything else. A restless mind is both a marvelous source of energy and a distraction from the other drives that push my life--you know, being a great parent and growing as a writer. If I could ever settle myself down to a single task, the world would be in trouble and I might get out of it.
Happy Reading to you and yours.
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Right next to "Silent Spring" in my high school library there was a copy of "The Population Bomb" and I grokked the main theses of each. I didn't know it at the time but they were both lies.
A few years later at Cedarville, I ran into another title, "The Myth Of Overpopulation" but that didn't take.
Jane was born a few months after High Command and I started trying. And just less than a year later, Dan came along unplanned. I freaked out and overreacted. You'll recall that I was a believer in the myth of overpopulation at the time. So, we stopped having kids.
Big mistake. Jane and Dan are uberkids who are a continual source of pride. I've discovered I'm an outstanding Dad and I really, really love the role. And High Command exceeds me in every aspect! Trouble is all that superior genetics and childrearing goodness will be limited to only two representatives in the Next Generation. (I'm also proud of my humility.) And incidentally, the population explosion is fizzling.
The other book Silent Spring caused the US to outlaw DDT and also got the international community to outlaw the stuff. As a result, malaria has caused millions of unnecessary deaths in Africa.
All that said, it's smart to take the stuff you read skeptically, particularly when nobody disputes the conventional wisdom of it. If memory serves from my environmentalist reading in the '70s, we should all have died of acid rain or something twenty years ago.
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