Reading Rainbow…

I’m still on vacation (till Monday) and in addition to enjoying the sun in Central Oregon, I’ve been trying to catch up on some reading for pleasure.

A few of the books I’m working through:

• Third World America – Arianna Huffington
• A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson
• The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula Le Guin
• A Wizard of Earthsea – Ursula Le Guin

I’ve never read any of Le Guin, but I grew up on fantasy novels, and have often wanted to put her at the top of my list.  Really enjoying her so far.

Have any of you read Bill Bryson?  In college I read Made In America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States. I’ve never been so entertained by a subject I imagined I would care so little about!  Bryson is witty, quick, and incredibly well-researched, so that you learn a great deal while being entertained.  A Short History of Nearly Everything is a great success.  It’s hardly short, but when one considers neatly covers astronomy, geology, paleontology, astrophysics, thermodynamics, oceanography, chemistry, and lots of other sciences I can’t think of off hand — and their development from the middle ages to the present — it’s quite astounding.  The sections on astronomy and astrophysics remind me of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, if Hawking had the wit of – say – David Sedaris.  I’m not a science guy, but Bryson makes just about any subject matter fascinating and loads of fun.

Huffington’s Third World America, on the other hand, is no fun to read at all.  It’s grim stuff.  It’s the kind of book where you keep saying to yourself, “someone needs to do something about this! People need to read this!” as you read it, even though it’s things you’ve felt in your gut for a long time.  But the back of the book lists acclaim from  all sorts of folks from a wide political spectrum (economist Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan – good read, by the way, and Republican Joe Scarborough) including Elizabeth Warren, who currently runs the new consumer protection agency… so that gives me some hope (if you haven’t seen Warren on The Daily Show, you’ve got to: HERE).

Anyway, some great quotations from Huffington’s book:

“The rate for those in the bottom 10 percent of income (in 2009) was a staggering 31 percent… Does anyone believe that the sense of urgency coming out of Washington wouldn’t be wildly different if the unemployment rate for the top 10 percent of income earners was 31?  If one-third of news producers, pundits, bankers, and lobbyists were unemployed, would the measures proposed by the White House and Congress still be as anemic?  Of course not – the sense of national emergency would be so great you’d hear air-raid sirens howling.  Instead, we get policy Band-Aids…” (p.13)

“Between 2000 and 2008, the poverty rate in the suburbs of the largest metro areas in the US grew by 25 percent – making the suburbs home to the country’s biggest and most rapidly expanding segment of the poor.” (p.18)

Sobering excerpts, but there’s a lot more, including exhortations for how we can begin to pull ourselves out.  Thankfully, Huffington has developed quite a platform.

Okay, so that’s what I’ve been reading.  You should pick a few of these up… but you don’t have to take MY WORD FOR IT!