Books/week

[jsburbidge]

So I was listening to CBC (my first mistake) and heard a gushing interview by the host of the program (cannot remember which) with someone else (another CBC staffer, naturally -- inbreeding is part of the CBC mystique) who had a project to read a book a week this year. The interview was along the lines of "Be careful, don't rupture yourself" and treating this as a dramatic and difficult goal.

Meh.

A book a week? If I get to make up the list, I can make it a challenge for anyone without genuinely copious free time (Finnegans Wake, Kapital, Cryptonomicon, or even The Stripping of the Altars), but the books this chap was reading weren't in anything like that category.

I looked back at the last four weeks.  I lead a reasonably busy life; I have a full-time job, I cook my meals rather than buy them; I spend a chunk of my week caring for a child.  I have several books "on the go" which are unfinished and which I won't count.  But I can still list, from the beginning of the year:

The City & The City (Mieville, Fiction)
The Black Hole War (Susskind, Popular Science)
The Fool on the Hill (Ruff, Fiction)
The Secret Lives of Buildings (Hollis, Architecture)
Among Others (Walton, Fiction)
The Devil's Eye (McDevitt, Fiction)