The reading glasses were lost, then found, then broken. When I return to Santa Fe I'll pick up the new ones and then, pfffft. I'll be back reading at top speed again, without an e-Reader (hint hint, Santa). My reads have stacked up.
Mother visited over Thanksgiving and told me she loved Edgar Sawtelle. Before I think of reading that, I have Three Cups of Tea that I have to read for a book club (the author visited Santa Fe to a sold-out audience in November) and besides, I want to pass that on as a White Elephant at our family Christmas exchange. When I pick up my new reading glasses this week, that's what I'm going to read, and then this is my list of nexts:
Other books on my next to-read list:
- The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising by Kenneth Roman
- The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
- Glorious One-Pot Meals: A Revolutionary New Quick and Healthy Approach to Dutch Oven Cooking by Elizabeth Yarnell
- Abraham Lincoln: A Life, a two-volume set by Michael Burlingame
- iBrain - surviving the technological alteration of the modern mind by Gary Small, MD and Gigi Vergan
- Media books: Media Politics: A Citizen's Guide, Shanto Iyengar & Jennifer McGrady; Is Anyone Responsible?: How Television Frames Political Issues, Shanto Iyengar; The Media Game: American Politics in the Television Age, Macmillan, Stephen Ansolabehere, Roy Behr & Shanto Iyengar; News That Matters: Television and American Opinion, Shanto Iyengar & Donald R. Kinder
- Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by Barton Gellman
- Steve Coll's The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century
- 100 Notable books NYT -- something from that list.
- Annette Gordon-Reed won the National Book Award for nonfiction this month for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family so maybe that or Other National Book Award Winners
I'm sorting out books from storage, remembering what I loved, what has shaped me as I place these relics on newly built book shelves. My favorite that I've reclaimed for the first re-read: Warren Chappell's A Short History of the Printed Word. It makes me think about the history of our times: the digital word. Here I give you the last paragraphs from A History of the Printed Word:
When Europeans first arrived in North America, some 500 languages were spoken between the Arctic Ocean and the Isthmus of Panama. Each one had a thriving oral literature, but very few... had a script of any kind. Practical alphabets have been devised in recent years for hundreds of Native American languages and much work has been done in establishing typographic forms appropriate to Native American oral literatures (which is a language neither verser nor prose)...it is another state of literary language, still ignored by many linguists and literary critics...there is good reason to believe it is an older literary medium than either verse or prose. It is pre-typographic language, only now developing a typographic form...
So part of my reading involves the reading of signs and symbols, one of my latest endeavors as I study the folk art of this area in New Mexico.