Reading Reading Reading Writing

I'm doing a lot of reading these days. It's absolutely splendid. I finally finished reading Working, and it felt like a big relief to be done. The book is exhausting; the voices add up to a giant cacophony, and although it's neat to get a sense of the personal narrative during a particular era, well, it was too much.

So. Now, I'm trying to finish up Bike for Life, which reads like a lengthy collection of magazine articles. I'm learning a thing or two, here or there, about bicycling technique, et cetera, but frankly, I'll be glad when it's over, too. Then I shall read some fiction. I picked up a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera somewhere a few months ago, and I want to just dive in. There's a handful of other books sitting on my nightstand as well, but gfrancie's feelings about The Elegance of the Hedgehog are making me pause before picking it up, even though I'm long overdue in passing the book along to DM.

And today, I have to return a spectacular book, Food for Home Use: Producing and Conserving, to its rightful owner, my ceramics instructor. The book belonged to her grandmother, so it's a prized possession, despite the fact that at some point a young child clearly got ahold of it and scribbled on the cover and front plate with a pencil. I wish someone would produce an updated version of this book. It basically goes through detailed instructions for how to grow and preserve food for a family of five, including everything you'd need to know about basic home meat production. Even as a vegetarian, I can admire that and appreciate the value of the knowledge.

I just wrote a response to gfrancie's rant about Michael Pollan-esque books and talked about FFHU because it's a great antidote to a lot of the food-related books on the market these days. First off, it's a quick and simple read; no flowery language waxing poetic. If I had had it available when I first started making jam and canning, I would have had an easy time getting into it.

My ceramics instructor had a fun time reading passages from the section on how to castrate a pig, but I didn't think it would be relevant for my gardening enterprises, so I haven't gone through that part yet.

Anyway, on top of this fun reading, I've been doing a lot of academic reading as well. This is that brief summer window, between teaching obligations, when I feel like I have my brain all to myself. It's so nice to poke through the literature now and again, to remind myself of what I know and why my research is relevant and useful.