sanpaku_backup | booklist

For much of my travels over the past month or so I've been chipping away at One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I finally finished it this afternoon. (The Mrs. always takes it as a sign of my mental health that I am reading fiction, even if she disapproves of high-falutin' literatoor.) Amid all the chaos it's worth filing away that I've managed to do a fair amount of heavy-duty reading. My Maine reading was mostly The War that Made America (about the French and Indian War) and Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail. At the Big Chicken Barn near Ellsworth I picked up a copy of American Pharaoh, about Mayor Daley's Chicago, a massive brick of a book. I enjoy sprawling urban history, but such usually has the drawback of being too heavy, amid all the other things I shlep around, to be good airplane reading material. So I'm about a quarter of the way through that.

Also, about a month ago, I finagled my way to getting not only access privileges to the Brown library, which I've had since I started teaching at URI, but borrowing privileges as well. Turns out all you really need to do is ask. So one evening after Henry went to bed, I was able to go to the Judaica section of A-Level, which as one might imagine for a university where Jacob Neusner used to teach, is pretty impressive. I only got up to the Talmudic period before the closing bell sounded, so my reading list has been heavy on that period, which I don't know well. Mostly I just grabbed volumes with interesting titles, and they've been just what the doctor ordered: not too long or too dense or too academese, while opening up a whole world of scholarship and philosophy that I've been in the mood to find. So I'm in the process of, or finished with: The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud, The Pluralistic Halakha (Heger), and I've just started Daniel Boyarin's Carnal Israel.

Am I unusual in usually having at least three books going at once? That's why I rack up the library fines.