OK, I'll try this. I'm an academic so I don't have much time for recreational reading during the rest of the year, but I should be able to get a jump start in the summer. This should help motivate me to whittle away at the unread stack in the corner! Today I finished:
1.
The Thinking Fan's Guide to Baseball by Leonard Koppett, a really good read about all the various aspects of the sport.
and am working on (I usually have several books going at one time)
2.
Rome the biography of a city by Christopher Hibbert; (I visited Rome last summer) and
3.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson; and
4.
Changing Minds by Howard Gardner.
One down, forty-nine to go!
Rosalind
Love to know what you think of Hibbert's Rome. I visited Italy in 2003 and fell in love with Rome. I could be happy living there, I think. :)
I'm crazy about Rome, also--I particularly love the way you can turn a nondescript city corner and come face to face with, say, a Bernini fountain. I'm about halfway through Hibbert and my only complaint is that because he covers so much territory (Romulus and Remus up to I think the 1980's) he just skims the surface of a lot of interesting history! But on the whole, it's a good read.
OK, I jumped the line and picked up a book I SHOULD have read years ago, but never got around to. So it now becomes the actual number two on my list, and the others that I have yet to finish slide down a notch. This is:
2.
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
a book that does an excellent job of laying out the basics behind genes, organisms, and evolutionary theory.
Jumped the line again, and read 3.
Freakonomics. Interesting, but as a scientist I find the idea of using actual data to draw conclusions somewhat less than startling. He does target some unique questions, though.
One just for fun: 4.
Trace by Patricia Cornwell
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