I've been reading books in earnest, for the first time since vet school. The scope of my current interests is so wide, and one thing leads to another so immediately, I can't seem to stick with just one or two until I'm done, which is becoming a problem.
It was bothering me that I had never read Crime and Punishment, so I checked it out of the library. I read half of it within days, and then abandoned it, though I was enjoying it, for lighter things. Just because, well, life is heavy enough without Dostoevsky, you know? I'll finish it later. I need a chart of characters and their nicknames, though.
When I want lighter things, I generally go for children's literature. This way I avoid poor quality adult stuff, but still get easy reading. Fortunately/unfortunately my latest venture led me randomly through the juvenile lit section at the library to Meindert DeJong, author of Newberry Prize Winner The Wheel on the School. I grabbed a couple of his books and cracked one open, to find a charming and alarmingly true-to-life story about barnyard violence between chickens. Chickens can really have it out for each other sometimes. The story (Along Came a Dog) was really lovely despite the blood and gore, so I was willing to move on to the next DeJong. The House of Sixty Fathers is a historical novel based on DeJong's own experience at war during the Japanese invasion of China. Now this was a traumatic story. I gave up Crime and Punishment for this horrifying tale of a child's apparently unending journey through loss, near drowning, starvation and every kind of peril?? I pushed through and loved the redeeming ending. I guess DeJong couldn't help it if it was a true story.
In the light non-fiction realm I am in the middle of Coop, a memoir my Michael Perry, who grew up on a dairy and sheep farm in the Midwest and has returned to the land with his small family. It's riotously funny, especially if you have ever participated in the artificial insemination of a cow, but even if you have not. It's also tender and important. I love it.
I am ALSO in the middle of Charles Petzold's book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software. This book is making me smarter by the page. I am 84 pages in to 382, and have traversed the concepts of codes in general (braille, morse, etc), electricity in general (volts, amps, circuits, grounds), switches, telegraphs, numbering systems (base ten, base eight, base four, binary) and how to add and multiply in each of them, and have finally arrived at the bit, which allows encoding of information in formats like the UPC code... and allowed Paul Revere to use his famous "one if by land, two if by sea" code. Among other things. When I get to page 300, I will finally understand the job I did at Oracle for several years, which centered around Unicode (j/k) (well, yes, my job did center around Unicode, but I did understand it. I don't have to wait for page 300. But I will understand it better! Maybe I can get my job back. j/k again. Sort of.)
In the car I am listening to At Home, by Bill Bryson. This book came highly recommended by my sister Katie and my mom. Talk about a chronicle! By way of exploring the history of his own home and why modern homes are the way they are and have the things they have, Bryson seems to have exhaustively listed and elucidated all the ways in which life was horribly difficult from prehistory through the Victorian era, with slight improvements to quality of life appearing only at and after the turn of the 20th century. All I can say right now is that I am exceedingly glad I am not a Victorian house servant. I do recommend the book with the caveat that you should expect long accounts of drudgery. Passages about food are very interesting, as are those about clothing, and particularly about laundry and chemicals. Poor house servants.
Other reading since January 2014:
Socrates in the City, ed. by Eric Metaxas. An excellent collection of talks given by brilliant people, about Life, God, and Everything.
Glacial Lake Missoula and its Humongous Floods by David Alt. I read part of it. Always a fascinating subject, especially if you live in/visit Eastern Washington!
The Chosen by Chaim Potok. I read this once a decade or so. It never gets old. I don't know what to say about it so I will quote a review from the back of the book: "It makes you want to buttonhole strangers in the street to be certain they know it's around... It revives my sometimes fading belief in humanity. Works of this caliber should be occasion for singing in the streets and shouting from the rooftops." - Robert Cromie, Chicago Tribune, sometime prior to publication of my copy in 1967. You want to know what it's about? Two Jewish boys from different sects, baseball game, wartime, Zionism. And it's serious about those things. But that's not what it's about.
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I re-read and totally marked up and underlined and wrote in the margins of the first two "books." There are four. I only stopped because I was reading Crime and Punishment, and then I got distracted... I need to finish. As far as I am concerned, this book is the BOMB. It is based on talks that Lewis gave over BBC radio between 1942 and 1944. He'd been asked to explain to Britons what Christians actually believe, and instead of starting with "Jesus Christ is the Son of God who Died for our Sins..." he started with "That's my seat, I was there first..." and then "It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed." From there he spends 30 pages working from the Law of Nature through its consequences before he presents Christianity, and he is so eminently clear and logical it's just compelling!
And some from the last several months:
In December I re-read A Tale of Two Cities. That is, I listened to it in my car, I've read it a few times, but this time just killed me. Hearing it, and hearing it voiced by an excellent reader, changed it for me. There were times when I needed it to end, because the violence was so unspeakable, and it just kept going. But that also seemed right. Because it WAS that way. Ooh. And oh, beautiful Sydney.
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell. I think once every 20 years is about right. SO different this time --I first read it just after I graduated from high school, and missed so much. Much richer this time, much more disturbing, Scarlett that much more maddening. Rhett too. And Ashley! Be a man, Ashley! This time around I wanted to learn a lot more about reconstruction in the south, too. Hmm. I should do that. The picture in this book is sure not what I was taught in school.
Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl. You can't beat a real-life adventure story like this one! Hey, let's float on a raft across the ocean! And they did it! Read it!
That's not everything, of course, but I really should go to sleep.
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