This Week at the Library (25 October)

Oh, dear, oh dear. The number of books I need to review but haven't gotten round to doing yet keeps increasing. Reviews outstanding: The Lost Hero, Rick Riordan; At Home in Mitford, Jan Karon; The Beginning Runners' Handbook by Ian MacNeill, and Active Living Every Day are all owed reviews.  That last one doesn't lend itself well to a full review, though, so I'll just say here that it was written for people who are completely inactive and who need encouragement in just getting started.  While walking is the easiest activity to begin,  it isn't the only one mentioned. The authors encourage complete couch potatoes to start stealing two minute walks whenever they can, work up to ten, and continue working up to an average of thirty minutes a day. That's easier than you might think, because exercise can be enjoyable. When I'm 40+ minutes into my walking in the morning, I feel like I could conquer the world.

  At Home in Mitford is also hard to review, because it doesn't have...a plot, as such. Not that it's harmed by this: it just follows the life of some people in a charming little town for a year and a half. It's...utterly beguiling -- cozy, "home"y.   I also finished reading a book last night I've not yet reviewed, called The Rapture Exposed, and it proved to be most interesting and useful.  More later!

Today at the library I picked up..

• God has a Dream:A Vision of Hope for Our Time, Desmond Tutu.  Last night I was invited to join a book club, and the November read is this. So I'll read it this week, take some notes, and hopefully remember having read it a month from now. 
• Clash of Wings: World War II in the Sky, Walter J. Boyne.  I have mentioned Boyne on this blog before, having used his The Influence of Air Power Upon History in many term papers. I owe a lot of my academic success to the man, frankly, and when I saw a Boyne book sitting in the library I had to check it out.
• Sharpe's Company, Bernard Cornwell. 
• The Astral, Kate Christensen. On display, this novel's cover caught my attention. I'm not committed to it, but some of the characters sounded interesting. A poet is kicked out of his apartment when his wife realizes some of his older poetry reveals he had an affair in his youth, and he loses everything and isn't quite comfortable with his lesbian daughter and cult-following son. My guess is he learns to stop taking things seriously and learns to love his oddball kids for who they are.

I have that history of math/science book I picked up last week still waiting my attention, and I'm struggling (!) to get into The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The opening story in this volume isn't nearly as enticing as the others.

In addition, I finished The Age of Reason Begins last night, so...that is joining the stack of books I've yet to review. I'm going to take a week-long break from the Story of Civilization series because frankly, I'm a little tired of reading about European wars. Two centuries of Catholics and Protestants frothing at the mouth, and burning each other's homes has taken its toll on me...and that's not even counting the 30 Years' War. Oy.  But next week I'll probably start The Age of Louis XIV.