Books, books, books. Today I

Books, books, books.

Today I wandered through Black Oak Books while waiting for a prescription to be filled at the pharmacy at the other end of the block. (Black Oak actually inhabits the space vacated by the pharmacy when they moved into the former quarters of a Lucky Supermarket that could no longer hack it in the Gourmet Ghetto.)

I love browsing bookstores. The titles spark associations in my mind. Just running my eyes over the spines of book shifts the cerebral machinery into high gear. Among the books at Black Oak I'd read if time permitted:

Future Evolution
The Forgetting (David Schenk, on Alzheimer's)
A Brain for All Seasons (Wm. Calvin)
The Future of Spacetime (Hawking et alia)
Making Sense of Life
The Dawn of Human Culture
The Moment of Complexity
The Living Clock, The Origins of Biological Rhythms
What Evolution Is
Links
Synaptic Self
What Just Happened (James Gleick)
Oaxaca Journal (Oliver Sachs)
The Future of Life (Wilson)
Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About (Donald Knuth)
Trail poems of Gary Snyder

I could go on.

I'm about halfway thourgh Wanderlust: A History of Walking, by Rebecca Solnit. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Soren Kierkegaard did almost all of their thinking on foot. Pilgrimages, whose walkers make it hard, and Wordsworth, who lived for this then-peasant activity. I'm currently reading of moutaineers, the founding of the Sierra Club, hiking, and long-distance walks. This is a fun read.

I'm also at the midpoint of Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web by David Weinberger. If you're not a web person, this is an important book. I've been reading Weinberger's stuff for several years so this is old ground. He's a very entertaining writer, nonetheless, so I'll make it through this one.

I found Linda and Richard Eyre's Teach Your Children Values for fifty cents. Since I'm such a fan of Richard's Spiritual Serendipity, I had to give it a shot. I've just started.

Posted by Jay Cross at June 15, 2002 12:47 AM | TrackBack