This week: fiction, the writing and reading of

Dear readers:

            The past few weeks have been taken up with National Novel Writing Month, of course. I got off to a roaring start, 20,000  words in the first week, before slowing down to the recommended average of 1667 words per day. Having nearly run out of plot, I was forced to set things on fire.   While I should reach the 50,000 words ahead of schedule, reading-wise I will probably be resorting to lighter fare like the historical fiction that's been seen so far. The approach of winter makes me yearn for outdoors adventures stories, as was the case with my Mt. Everest set last year. My library just acquired a couple of local history titles which I've already started to investigate: No Hill too High for a Stepper and Images of America: Selma, authored by a woman who used to own the local main-street movie theater.  I also recently finished a short work on distributism, called Beyond Capitalism and Socialism.

Its front cover is startling similar to that of Bill Kauffman's Look Homeward, America, and both deal with similar themes. Suffice it to say they're both in the realm of Small is Beautiful and Human Scale;  E.F. Schumacher, and Kirkpatrick Sale provides the foreword.  They don't share publishers, but Beyond identifies its frontspiece as Grant Wood's Spring in Town. Wood also created American Gothic.  

I realized recently that my science reading this year has been rather pathetic, so now I'm halfway into Varieties of Scientific Experience, and my hope is that it will whet my appetite enough to take on Galileo's Finger.  I will knock out that sole item on the TBR list before the end of the year!  

Is anyone else doing NaNo? How are you faring? I can be stalked on the Nano forums as 'smellincoffee', for those who are registered there.  Well, happy reading!