Eat Any Good Books Lately?

Rainy Saturday. We've been needing a good wet lately. Conversely, the humor around here has been anything but dry. Be all that as it may, my doing very little, other'n buying books at the local Borders and putting in an hour at the gym, makes for a productive day I should think.

I bought three books, two from the New Paperbacks section and a third when I came out of the men's room in the back and just in passing, effectively judging it by its cover. The Mother Tongue -- English and How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson. An excerpt:

But there are other factors at work, such as history and geography. The colonists along the eastern seaboard naturally had closer relationships with England than those colonists who moved inland. That explains at least partly why the English of the eastern seaboard tends to have so much in common with British English -- the tendency to put a "yew" sound into words like stew and Tuesday, the tendency to have broader and rounder "a" and "o" sounds, the tendency...

Hmm. Maybe I'll just return this one. Kidding. I'm convinced I need something a little highbrow to plug into my information corticals -- beyond, say, Desperate Housewives (although that'll do). Not unlike having a salad between every fourth Mickey McCheese, and one without the pasta because I like to think I'm a good boy.

I suspect, however, that I'll read the other two first. Par example, Noam Chomsky's Imperial Ambitions - Conversations on the Post-9/11 World:

In a new documentary The Fog of War, Robert McNamara makes a rather interesting admission. He quotes General Curtis LeMay, with whom he served in the period of the firebombings of Japanese cities in World War II, as saying, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." Then McNamara says, "I think he's right . . . . But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"

Indeed, but then McNamara would wonder given he's the cat who lost Vietnam. A lesson unlearned by today's sociopaths at the Pentagon.

I did say highbrow, yes? But I've been wanting to read something by Chomsky for a while, especially since he gets the chickenhawks so exorcised. Makes him must reading in my book.

Then there's The Know-It-All -- One Man's Humble Quest to Become The Smartest Person in the World by A.J. Jacobs. What grabbed me was the backcover summation by Joel Stein of Time Magazine:

A.J. Jacobs turns the act of reading the entire Britannica into a hilarious memoir . . . . It's a stunt of the book itself that allows the funny, touching memoir to be so stuffed with nutritious bits of trivia that you feel smart for reading it.

An example of Jacobs' endeavor:

ooze

Ooze, I learn, is sediment that contains at least 30 percent skeletal remains of microscopic floating organisms. You've got to marvel at the specificity of that. Thirty percent; 29 percent and you're out of luck, buddy. You may be sediment, but you're no ooze.

And:

orgasm

They can be experienced from infancy. What? Did I have orgasms when I was an infant? Did I smoke a tiny cigarette afterward.

And one more:

Casanova

The famous 18th-century lothario ended his life as a librarian. Librarians could use that to sex up their image.

Those are just some of the shorter bits. Not in the mood for keying in pages of the stuff. And that's the other thing, there's no cutting & pasting from paperback to hardrive. Thank the Godlings I can type.

Of course reading books is something I've gotten away from since in my day, what with the advent of newspapers and television. The internet's been a boon inasmuch as fewer and fewer people are buying newspapers, which presumably means fewer trees need to be cut down, i.e., beyond the heinous ruination of our old-growth forests merely to add to industry's jollies. But I'd like very much to get away from the computer too as I just know it's boiling my eyeballs.

And with that in mind...