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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
Out of the Miocene
I'm glad this was short. It wasn't very good. Probably it's greatest fault is in being horribly dated. I'd read two other books by Beecham and liked them quite well . This didn't match up. Part of the problem was that the others were adventure stories of the southwest Pacific. This one, on the other hand was rather a sort-of science fiction piece. As nearly as I can tell, it only exists as a two-part story in an old magazine [The Popular Magazine]. I clipped the parts to make an ebook. So, we have a famous expert in Jurassic reptilia, Bruce Dayton, traveling around in the southwest with a geodetic survey. He gets lost, but eventually finds a cave/cabin/??? in which resides a wild looking elderly man, Eugene Scott. Scott has spent the previous 40 or so years searching for Darwin's missing link. Somehow, Scott has learned how to transport one's soul from one's own body into other bodies, even ones from the long past.
So, Dayton agrees to a test and finds himself suddenly living in a tree, with a hairy body and behaving like an uncultured beast. Slowly, Dayton evolves (probably gets increasingly fairer skin...I forget). We have a back and forth between Dayton's brutish, primitive self and his more evolved, modern self. So, I guess we're supposed to learn what it might be like to turn into a caveman for a time. I dunno, it didn't really work for me. Perhaps I need to evolve a bit more so as to develop a more fanciful imagination.
