Winter Reading

Winter diversion -- taking a break from Science Ficion

Many people who know me also know of my life-long addition to outstanding Science Fiction; that I carefully packed and moved about 700 SF paperback to Hawaii, tidily alphabetized by author, is no longer an embarrassment.  It has been interesting to re-read some SF books that I read 35-40 years ago – to note the folded pages or scribbled annotations.  These many years later, it is easy to see how my early conversion to the genre influenced my choice to pursue cultural anthropology.  It is also noteworthy that, decades later, we can now point to black holes, and other wildly crazy cosmological phenomena as “facts” – ideas that were merely playful outlines of what “might be” when I was 25 years old.

On occasion I intuitively gravitate toward a batch of non-SF, never selected because they are “best sellers” but often because they are at someone’s garage sale, or a friend offers a personal recommendation.  Fortunate for me I have a couple friends who know me almost too well and have a preternatural ability to select books that are spot-on. Those include Ocean at the end of the Lane, and The Maddaddam Trilogy by Atwood (special mahalo to Cheryl.) If you are near the end of your favorite book, or find yourself in a state of book dearth, you may want to do a search of these or any of the following titles. 

• The Forest Lover is now tenderly battered from my third reading and from sharing with others; The Wave was an intense ride around the world learning about 100-foot waves and the water-world on which we live and depend; Cutting for Stone I found impossible to put down – a gripping story of twin brothers born in India.  (From a search about the author I discovered this book was #1 on President Obama’s summer reading list.)  Finally is Flight Behavior, an intensely personal journey of self-discovery and how the most delicate of behaviors, like the Monarch butterfly, can teach us about ourselves and our world.