i finished "the minotaur takes a cigarette break" last night which was the last book on the pile by my bed. i have a problem controlling my book buying, so i have this rule that i am not allowed to buy any books until the by-the-bed pile is empty. and today it is. let the good times roll.
"the minotaur," by the way, was a good book. it tells the tale of what the minotaur from the greek myth is doing today. it turns out, he is a cook in the american south who lives in a trailer park, fixes cars as a hobby and dreams of opening his own corndog business. i loved how he led a quiet, ordinary, somewhat sad, existence and yet the people around him only had a vague inkling that there was anything unusual about their bull-headed co-worker and neighbor.
before that i read "for love of country", a collection of essays about political philosophy. it started with an essay by martha nussbaum, a professor of law and philosophy at the university of chicago. in 1994 she wrote an essay about the meaning and utility of patriotism in modern society–ultimately concluding that patriotism should be discarded in favor of "cosmopolitanism," i.e. the idea that we are all citizens of the world, rather than citizens of a particular country. over twenty philosophers (some famous, some not) wrote essays responding to nussbaum's essay, fifteen are reprinted in "for love of country." nussbaum then gets the last word with a rebuttal essay at the end. the book was okay, it certainly was a much faster read than most political philosophy books i have encountered. but as much as nussbaum's general thesis appealed to me, it seemed a little simple-minded. the 15 reaction pieces each criticized nussbaum's idea from a different angle. some made good points that nussbaum never quite addressed in her rebuttal (there were too many to address all of the objections in one essay) and so her rebuttal seemed half-hearted.
before that was "anil's ghost" which was great. my wife is a big fan of michael ondaatje and read the book a while ago. she told me it was a good book to read while traveling so i took it with me to uzbekistan.
whenever i plan a trip alone, i always think that i will read a lot when i travel. i read a lot when i am at home and traveling alone always includes plenty of dead time, especially when i am in a developing country with its inevitable delays and inconveniences. but when i travel alone, i never seem to read much, instead i write. i write postcards, i keep journals, etc. i spend all the dead time documenting what i see around me and never find the time to read. there's always time to do that when i get home. the uzbekistan trip was no different. i hauled "anil's ghost" and 2 other books across the country, never cracking them open except for on the plane home.
but i finally read "anil's" after i got back. surprisingly, it made me want to go to sri lanka. i think my wife had the opposite impression. and i agree, it would have made a good travel book. that is, if i read while traveling.
