Reading Project Update: I’m making slow but steady progress through the Wodehouse bio, which is interesting but pretty dense. I’ve got just over 100 pages to go and have made it a priority to finish before I leave for my Thanksgiving trip to D.C., so I can read The Code of the Woosters on the plane. I always want something light (both physically and emotionally) and super-fascinating for my travel reading, and I spend a lot of mental energy planning the perfect books to bring on a trip. I have a secret terror of being trapped somewhere without something good to read. This is why I would bring half a dozen books on an overnight trip when I was a kid—of course I knew I’d only have time to read a few of them, but I required access to a wide selection. This is also probably why one of my childhood fantasies was being locked in a bookstore overnight. And why in middle school I thought being in prison wouldn’t be so bad, as long as there was a well-stocked library. Now that I’ve seen Oz and graduated to actually enjoying fresh air and physical movement, I’ve rejected that last idea, but I still carefully strategize about which books to pack in my carry-on bag…and I still usually bring way too many, although now this seems like good common sense, given the state of air transportation today. I pray to never be stuck on a runway for six hours, but I hope that if it happens, I’ll at least be reading something awesome.
Since the end of the year is when all those “Best American Whatever Writing” collections come out, that makes choosing books for holiday travel a no-brainer. Anthologies are perfect travel reading—if you don’t like one story, just turn a few pages and you’ll find something entirely different. It’s basically like having a magazine but looking smarter. Thus, my other reading selections for the Thanksgiving trip will be The Best American Crime Reporting 2007 and Best Food Writing 2007 (yeah, the 2008 books are already coming out, but these are new to me—my library’s painfully slow in acquiring the latest entries in the series I like). I’m pretty pleased about the prospects, but my flights still better go smoothly. Even a good book can only pass the time for so long.
I’m also doing the Mr. Burns “Exxxxcellent” finger-tenting gesture because I managed (through my mad hold-list skillz) to snag a library copy of Sarah Vowell’s brand-new book about Puritans, The Wordy Shipmates. I’ve only read the first few pages, but I have no doubt I’ll enjoy it.
And finally, I just finished reading two stellar young-adult novels that should be just as appealing to real adults: The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace, by Ellen Klages. They combine a number of my favorite book elements: an interesting historical setting (in this case, the Manhattan Project during World War II in the first book, and the early postwar rocketry program in the second), strong female characters, unlikely friendships, kids who are smart without being annoyingly precocious, and people who have rich interior lives with interesting hobbies/obsessions/fields of expertise. The details of the time period are effortlessly drawn, the books are chock-full of social history and science and engineering and art, and I loved the adorably brainy characters. It’s surprisingly rare to find a work of fiction about smart people that is actually smart itself (just one of the many that fails to pull it off: the movie Smart People). I can only hope that Klages is planning another book in the series.
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