Reading …
A colleague just posted on the NCWP ning that she’s reading Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. I read all of Stegner one summer about 20 years ago now, I suppose. My father moved from NYC to Salt Lake City at the age of about 6 (his dad was a Wall Street bigwig at the time of the 1929 crash, and moved to Utah to manage a copper mine after that). So I was interested in understanding more about Utah and SLC from a literary perspective, as well as one similar to my dad’s (another non-Mormon growing up in SLC in the 20s-30s). Anyway, loved everything he wrote, and will also have to revisit those books sometime soon.
I just got back from a week with the in-laws in Oregon, so spent most of the time with my nose in some books. The first was Shakespeare’s Secret by Elise Broach (and I really only bought it because the picture on the cover is awesome–how shallow am I?), a children’s novel about a girl named Hero (named after the character in Much Ado). Quick and fun. Lots of painless-but-interesting info about Shakespeare built in (esp. about the controversies over authorship) as part of the plot. I’m thinking it would be a way better way to introduce Shakespeare than the typical boring lectures … Maybe it would pair well with Gary Blackwood’s books (although his are set in the time of Shakespeare, and so provide a different kind of history. Together, they’d give a good sense of Shakespeare’s time and his literary legacy.
Then I read Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, a book about behavioral economics. It’s pretty awesome, for a book about a subject that generally baffles me (economics, that is; as a teacher and parent, I’m well-versed in irrational behaviors). It does things like as us to investigate why we’ll drive across town to save $5 off a $15 purchase, but won’t do the same to save $5 off a $250 purchase. It’s the same time investment, and the same net savings, but we only look at these two transactions from a relational perspective.
When I finished that, I didn’t dig out Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys (although I’d brought it along), because it’s something of a sequel to American Gods and it’s been probably 5 years since I read that and I wanted to read a synopsis to catch me up again before beginning it (and yes: that sentence did, in fact, get away from me). So instead, I checked what I had on my iPod Touch, and found Thackeray’s Vanity Fair ready to go via a neat little e-book reader called Stanza. I’d tried to read that a couple of times, but hadn’t made it past the first few chapters. But this time I just dove in, and am currently, according to Stanza, 25.73% into the book. I have no idea how that translates into pages, but it’s enough that I’m hooked and will now finish it.
And then I’ll be on to Gaiman. I also have his second volume of Absolute Sandman to read, so maybe I’ll do that concurrently.
July 15 2009 09:24 pm | Daily life