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Reading Slothfully
I was told in elementary school that I only could read at half the speed for success in college. Oh well, one benefit of slow reading is you get to live with the characters a longer period of time. I read in a vain attempt to better understand people. At my other homes, I'm known as a spouse, pop, guy in the choir, physical chemist, computer/web dilettante and child-care provider. In theory, I'm a published author, if you consider stuff like Quenching Cross Sections for Electronic Energy Transfer Reactions Between Metastable Argon Atoms and Noble Gases and Small Molecules to count as publications. I've strewn dozens of such fascinating things to the winds.
Currently reading
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
The Spirit of the Border
Ramona the Brave (Ramona, #3)
The Underground Man (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
Delilah of the Snows
Mrs. Miniver
Betsy-Tacy Treasury (P.S.)
A Christmas Carol
The Way Some People Die
Envy of Angels
The Valley of the Giants
This is one of those rugged old manly man kinds of books, pitting a good, fair-playing capitalist against an underhanded one. The story revolves around red-wood timber magnates in Northern California. It's a pretty good yarn, albeit melodramatic, at times. The characterization of women is predictably paternalistic (hey, its from a century ago, before suffrage). Interestingly, however, the primary female character is unusually shrewd in a business sense in between her fits of swooning and peevishness over the manly man of her dreams. This is escapist literature from a century ago, the kind of stuff my grandfather-in-law liked (although he turned me on to James Oliver Curwood, but this stuff is somewhat similar). It does it's job well enough.
