It's not that I'm reading slowly these days but I'm reading THICK books, some of them. I have to read them at the breakfast table because they're too big to hold in my hands. Here's a big one:
Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Hmanism, and Progress. I like his books, I've read seven of them, and specially like the ones on language, writing and thinking, and, of course, The Better Angels of Our Nature is a feel-good book with convincing (comforting) stats to reassure us that the world is getting better (taking a looong view). Enlightenment Now continues in the same vein but it's a bit too graph-happy for me, in the first chapters. Now the thick successor that has taken its place at the table, is Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Haven't finished it yet; I'm a few pages from the end of chapter two. The first chapter was very long - 78 pages. Titled "The New Human Agenda" It felt like another chapter of Pinker's books, but it's not continuing that way. TBC
I finished Douglas Coupland's Bit Rot (1916). I left off a while back, and just got back to it. Coupland is a very stimulating writer. I mean, he stimulates a lot of thoughts and responses in me. Way back (1991), his first novel, Generation X, triggered a play in me. The book I bought had very wide margins, inviting rebuttal. My marginalia turned into a play (Moon and Murna, in Alumnae Theatre's Festivsl of New Idea, 2004). Bit Rot is related to Gen X. I have to think (write) some more. Fun.
i've begun to pedal again, in the building gym, and therefore reading mysteries/thrillers - whatever they're called. I don't like violent ones. I read Broken Harbour by Tana French; it was too thick, too many pages, too verbose, so I'm back with Ian Rankin. When John Rebus first emerged in Knots and Crosses (1987) I read everything as fast as Rankin could write. I took him on a plane to Scotland and bought two more new ones in Glasgow for my trip home. I was visiting relatives (my husband's family) and they were helpful with some of Rankin's Scottish vocabulary. I remember haar - to do with weather, foggy, I think...Yes
haar noun: a cold sea fog on the east coast of England or Scotland. ORIGIN late 17th cent.: perhaps from Old Norse hárr ‘hoar, hoary’.
More to come....