The Curmudgeonly Professor

A Book to Read: Small Change by Penny Burford

Here is a small gem of a book that takes a simple story and turns it into an ode to the human heart by showing the possibilities that can result from small things.  Belinda J. Yandells's short novel "Small Change:  The Secret Life of Penny Burford" has several interconnecting themes and a major surprise or two.  Starting with a nickel, here is what Penny accomplished.  A book to read aloud and cherish.

My Latest Book Order from Amazon.com

There is nothing so much fun as finding a new box of books on my porch with the Amazon swoop signaling I have much new reading material to add to my hundreds of already-unread, but soon-to-be read, books.  The first book in the following list was chosen for our book study group for July, so I had to order that one.  But to get free shipping and to mollify my curiosity, I, of course, added a few others.  Here is the list:

1. Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape: On Zion's Mount, by Jared Farmer (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2008).  The story of two Utah landmarks, Mt. Timpanogos and Utah Lake, and how the Mormons displaced the Indians from their native area around Utah Lake.  Outstanding reviews.
2. The Photographer's Eye:  Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos by Michael Freeman.  (Burlington MA: Elsevier and Focal Press, 2007)  An absolutely gorgeous book, one from which I have already learned a few things.
3. High Wire:  The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families by Peter Gosselin. (New York:  Basic Books, 2008).  The Washington Post calls this story of economic issues confronting American families a page turner.
4. The Looting of America:  How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity by Les Leopold.  (White River Jnct VT: Chelsea Green Publ. 2009).  The title makes the book sound like a pot-boiler, but strong reviews from numerous respected journalists, authors, and economists.  It's time we all learned about derivatives and such.
5. Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good:  The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 by Sarah Lacey. (New York: Gotham Books, 2008).   About innovators who never gave up on their internet dreams.

The latter three are available in mass market paperback.  If you're looking for something else to read, try one or more of these and then we'll compare notes.

A Book to Cherish: Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney

I can't remember where I discovered the book Miss Rumphius, but I thought it might provide a moment of cheer for my wife who lives with spinal pain. And then we went to the Alpine poppy field at the bottom of the mountain

on a rocky and tree and sagebrush covered corner of land overlooking the expanse of Utah County and Utah Lake. And there were the wild yellow roses and the orange and red poppies everywhere, planted from seeds and plants brought across the prairie by covered wagon and then allowed to spread over the brushy landscape as the years went by. Then I realized the Aspen poppy field was a real-life footnote to the charming and indelible story of Miss Rumphius.

Alice was a young girl when she sat on her grandfather's knee who told her stories of faraway places. Stirring Alice's imagination, she said that she, too, would go to faraway places and live beside the sea. Then her grandfather told her of one more thing she must do: "You must do something to make the world more beautiful."

So then Miss Rumphius traveled and searched the world and finally settled in a home by the sea on a rocky outcrop, still seeking a way to make the world more beautiful. Then she planted flower seeds in the rocky ground. Next spring, she was bed ridden but could see the blooming lupines outside her window. As she became better, she went over the hill and discovered the wind and the birds had scattered the seeds. So then she bought seeds and scattered them everywhere. And the bright colors of the flowers appeared wherever she went the following spring. Then she realized she had done something to make the world more beautiful.

The book closes with Miss Rumphius, an old lady, speaking to her great niece who tells Miss Rumphius that she, too, wants to go to faraway places. To which Miss Rumphius replies, "You must do something to make the world more beautiful." And so the cycle goes.

Just as Miss Rumphius ultimately discovered the secret of making the world more beautiful, so did the poppy lady leave the world a more beautiful place long after she was gone by starting the poppies among the brush and rocks and letting them spread and grow from year to year. Flowers, indeed, are one way to make the world more beautiful.

A Book to Read: Alan Bennett's "The Clothes They Stood Up In and The Lady in the Van"

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I can't remember how I came upon this curious but memorable little book.  Alan Bennett is a renowned British writer and playwright who wrote "The Madness of King George" and a variety of other plays, some for television, and screenplays.  This book is a composite of Bennett's first foray into fiction, "The Clothes They Stood Up In" and a true story, written in part from diaries he kept over the 15 plus years that "The Lady in the Van" kept her van in Bennett's yard.

The reviews expressed far more praise and exuberance for these two stories than I felt upon reading them, but I think much of that had to do with the fact that I have not read much British humor.  Nonetheless, I was glad I read the stories, because they both taught some lessons about possessions and the "things" we own and treasure, although the stories were tinged with sadness.

In "Clothes," Rosemary and Maurice Ransome return from the opera to find their home "burgled" clean:  nary a thing left.  Gone were the supper casserole, the stove, the toilet paper, the furniture, the rugs--everything taken.  The story that follows is a story about the role material possessions play in our lives, and about how Rosemary and Maurice set out to rebuild their possessions and their lives from scratch.  Rosemary becomes a shopper; Maurice is pleased that the insurance will pay for a better stereo set than he had before to indulge his passion for Mozart.  To tell you what happened after this "burgling" would be to ruin your fun in reading the story.

In the second story (The Lady in the Van), Bennett recounts the true story of an eccentric woman whom he allowed to park her van in his front yard for nearly 20 years, an accommodation that perhaps few others would have allowed.  You can smell the interior of the van when you enter it, so perceptive and descriptive is Bennett's writing.  How Bennett endured Miss Shepherd's mean spirit and nasty disposition all those years is a lesson in compassion and humanity.

Both stories prompt readers to contemplate the value and usefulness of their own possessions, and to evaluate the importance of material things in our lives.  I did not find the stories as funny as the reviewers promised, but I did find the characterizations and the narratives memorable, endowed with many life lessons.

Do Plants Have Personalities? Carol Klein Says Yes

The Curmudgeonly Professor's curmudgeonliness may have waned a bit after spending the last year photographing and posting thousands of photos of flowers.  This activity served as a significant learning experience.  First of all, taking photos is a pastime that leads us to observe our surroundings carefully and to search out an almost infinite variety of perspectives of what we normally may just ignore or glance at only for a moment and then pass by.  Taking pictures of flowers leads to searching for any kind of blossom on any kind of plant.  And then, continuing to take thousands of photos of flowers leads to noticing carefully the myriad colors, patterns, geometry, and design of every thing we see blooming.

Along the pathways of this experience, the question occurred to me:  Do flowers have personalities?  It certainly seemed to me as if flowers did, in fact, have personalities.  A rose, for instance, is one flower that is stunningly beautiful in its budding phase, seemingly modest and promising a greater display as it unfolds its delicate petals.  An iris is a ruffled beauty, a show off, with its orchid-like petals.  A sunflower is a bright promise of things to come if we, like, the sunflower, just follow the light.  The large white flowers on the cactus in our neighborhood in St. George are so luminous, so pristinely and brilliantly white, that they seem almost sacred in their beauty.  And their luminous whiteness is only a portent of their imminent demise, a reminder that we cannot save everything we love forever, no matter how achingly beautiful.  

I was pleasantly surprised to learn of Carol Klein's book titled "Plant Personalities: Choosing and Growing Plants by Character" (Timber Press) in the recent Daedalus Books catalog (where, by the way, the price is $5.98 plus shipping as a publisher's remainder).  Thus, my observation and hypothesis that plants have personalities was vindicated.

In the Daedalus book review, the writer stated:

Plants can be flamboyant and voluptuous, funny and frivolous, but do they really have personalities?  [the writer] . . . offers a resounding yes.  Good-natured, bread and butter plants contribute to the garden for months, while others are fleeting, shooting to stardom for a brief, breathtaking performance.  There are the garden gatecrashers who just show up one day, the touchy-feely plants who add sensuality, and the drama queens who demand the spotlight.  (with superb close-up photographs),

I haven't ordered the book yet, but I will.  Meanwhile, gardeners and flower lovers, see what you can learn about the personalities of your plants.

 

A Book to Read to Help You Understand Why We Make Irrational Decisions: Sway by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman

During my long years of teaching college economics, I always emphasized two points from what might seem like an otherwise boring economics class that would stand students in good stead throughout their lives:

1. Ignore fixed costs in making current decisions about the future.
2. Stick with "what is" considerations (positive or objective analysis) and not with "what you wish it to be" (normative analysis based on biases). 

Ignoring fixed costs means just that:  what's past is past, and while we may need to make amends for past mistakes in some way, we can't change what has already happened.  Continuing to focus on fixed costs because we feel committed to stay in ruts leads to the death of huge corporations, mistakes in choosing a marriage partner, and an endless trail of other irrational decisions.

Making decisions based on biases and preconceived notions may mean we miss the correct medical diagnosis, an important shift in consumer choice, or may explain how we make countless other irrational mistakes when we make decisions.

The authors of Sway:  The Irresistable Pull of Irrational Behavior (New York:  Doubleday (2008)  take these basic arguments, add numerous other illustrations of irrational behavior, and provide us with an irrefutable panaroma of reasons why we continue to make irrational decisions.  Rom Brafman is a practicing psychologist who focuses on the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, while Ori Brafman, according to his bio, is "a renowned organizational expert."  When you finish reading this short and entertaining book, you will likely wonder, first, how you could have made so many dumb mistakes, and, secondly, you may alter your decision-making process permanently.

Here are a few gems from their narrative:

• Diagnosis bias results " . . . the moment we label a person or a situation, we put on blinders to all evidence that contradicts our diagnosis." (p. 7)
• "Here's where commitment merges with the sway of 'value attribution': our tendency to imbue someone or something with certain qualities based on perceived value, rather than on objective data." (p. 49) 
• ". . . a single word has the power to alter our whole perception of another person--and possibly sour the relationship before it even begins." (p. 73) 
• ". . . we often ignore all evidence that contradicts what we want to believe." (p. 88) 
• "Negative and external feelings about old age . . . can actually make people physically age faster."  (p. 105) 
•  It is only by recognizing and understanding the hidden world of sways that we can hope to weaken their influence and curb their power over our thinking and our lives."

Paying attention to the fundamental ideas expressed so clearly in this book could have saved innumerable failures made by major corporations in not adapting to change,  and could have resulted in making more objective and rational decisions.  And then there are the individual decisions we make, all of the decisions politicians and governments make, all of the decisions football coaches and educational institutions and teachers and lawyers and doctors and, for that matter, all of the decisions any and all of us make.  This book is definitely worth a few dollars and is worth reading and rereading. 

A Book to Read: Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God by Jonah Blank

Jonah Blank's impressive work "Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana Through India" was first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1992, then revised in places and reissued by Grove Press in 2000.  New copies are scarce, but used copies are available through Amazon, B & N, and other booksellers.

Clearly this is a book I never would have known about, let alone would have read, had it not been chosen by our book study group leader for this month, who is an expert on India among countless other topics.  Like all books that open new territory, one reads it not only acknowledging the depths of one's own ignorance, but also with a growing incentive to learn more.  Among other bits of information provided by our discussion leader are these:

• Due to absence of birth control, India continually generates increases in population sufficient to people another country the size of Taiwan.  
• Along one seven hundred mile stretch of the Ganges River,  a new language can be found every fifteen miles or so due to the fact that no one has ever traveled more than five miles from home in these rural areas .   

Of course, modern India provides a dramatic example of the effects of economic growth and accompanying shifts in living standards for those who have participated in this remarkable change.  But these recent developments are another story.

I was impressed, first of all, with the author's remarkable ability to assimilate the complex culture, the intricacies of various religions, and to provide remarkable insights that not only illuminate the emergence of modern India, but also which have applications for other cultures and lands.  I understand the author was in his early 20's when he wrote the first edition of this book, which makes his work even more impressive.

The author's goal was to retrace the journey  of the god Rama, the legendary god of the ancient Sanskrit epic, across India.  As a 1992 review by Reed Business Information, Inc., observes:

Coupling journalistic detachment with piercing lyricism, he samples the subcontinent in all its horrific, multitudinous, overwhelming diversity, from Bombay's Hollywood-style dream factories to Calcutta's leper-filled streets.

Blank takes us through the labyrinthine culture of "lingering" caste divisions, the Indian bureaucracy, and the lingering impact of the British Raj, as he writes "beautifully and taps into India's elusive indestructible soul." (Reed Business Information quote).

I'll provide just a few quotes that stood out when I read the book:

• The Hindu faith places greater emphasis on an individual's actions than perhaps any other religion in the world. (p. 33)
• A quote that demonstrates Blank's powers of observation and lyrical writing:  Not that the desert suggests any luxury.  It is a bare land, full of herds of black-headed sheep jumbled up with herds of shaggy-legged camels, a dirty plain where dun-colored goats can scarcely be distinguished from the dun-colored earth.  The only shocks of color are the clothes of the inhabitants:  women drape themselves in exuberant purple saris, men wrap their heads in turbans dyed flaming red or neon green.  Such flamboyance seems out of place here, but a ruler can break any rule.  ( p. 59)
• India is more a conglomeration than a country, a hodgepodge of hundreds of cultures, languages, and people held together by an idea.  I am not sure what that idea is.  (p. 207) 

Some times we need to be jolted out of our complacent state of life and learn something new to unclog our mental pores.  "Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God"  will make you wonder why you never learned anything more than seventh-grade geography about one of the most diverse and important countries on earth.  Let me know if you read it.   

A Book to Read: The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

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I thought I had reviewed this book, but upon checking, decided I hadn't.  Timothy Egan's book "The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl" (New York:  Houghton Mifflin, 2006) is one of the most moving and memorable books I have ever read.  The book brings back memories of the indelible photos and narrative in Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,"  Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," and other works of the Great Depression years.

Egan begins by quoting Willa Cather in his frontispiece:  "Between the earth and the sky I felt blotted out."

The story begins with writing so lyrical that it almost belies the wrenching stories to follow:

On those days when the wind stops blowing across the face of the southern plains, the land falls into a silence that scares people in the way that a big house can haunt after the lights go out and no one else is there.  It scares them because the land is too much, too empty , claustrophobic in its immensity.  It scares them because they feel lost, with nothing to cling to, disoriented.  Not a tree, anywhere.  Not a slice of shade.  Not a river dancing away, life in its blood.  Not a bump of high ground to break the horizon, give some perspective, spell the monotone of flatness.  It scares them because they wonder what is next. (page 1).

And then, this on page 2:

In those cedar posts and collapsed homes is the story of how the greatest grassland in the world was turned inside out, how the crust blew away, raged up the sky and showered down a suffocating blackness off and on for a decade.  . . . The land convulsed in a way that had never been seen before . . .

And page 5:

The rains disappeared . . . Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains--a force of their own.  When the dust fell, it penetrated everything,: hair nose, throat, kitchen, bedroom, well.  A scoop shovel was needed just to clean the house in the morning.  The eeriest thing was the darkness.  People tied themselves to ropes before going to a barn just a few hundred feet away, like a walk in space, tethered to the life support system. Chickens roosted in midafternoon.

Some times we need to be reminded of the past, of the struggles and trials and courage and hopelessness that our predecessors experienced.  The "Worst Hard Time" is the indelible story of what has been labeled as the greatest environmental disaster in American History, written by a master journalist who produced a book that has received

numerous honors.  Read it, and you will never forget it.  And you will wonder how anyone survived.

Nelson DeMille's Novel Titled Night Fall

In my continuing effort to make up for lost time reading popular whodunits, potboilers, espionage, crime, mysteries, and other books that can be read in a few hours, I worked my way through Nelson DeMille's novel "Night Fall."  I should have become a writer of cataclysmic disasters with twisting deceptions, vicious lies, evil people who are holding the red button to destroy the plant or even the universe, and made millions of dollars instead of boring thousands of students to slumber and tears for 40 years.  DeMille is a clever and successful writer, but he is a tad liberal with the potty language and explicit shenanigans.

I was left with one enduring thought from this book, p. 173:

"The problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you're finished."

Other than that, I pursued the book to the predictable ending disaster and the narrow survival of the protagonists.  And then moved on to the next book wondering what total disaster I could come up with to write a doomsday novel.  And then, it came to me:  Passing the Obama budget!  I'll get started on my novel very soon.

Message for Book Lovers: Check Out Dear Reader. Com

Just proving that the blogosphere is not only inundated with inane personal nonsense but also with treasures of useful, entertaining, and valuable gems,  check out dearreader.com at this link.  You can choose among a number of different book categories, subscribe to the email postings for each book category of interest, and read several five-minute excerpts from books that look interesting to see if you want to buy and read them.  I've been receiving the non-fiction posts for many months now, and have discovered a number of books I never would have known about from them.  The current book listing today is Atul Gawande's new book titled Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance.  Reading the excerpt often is enough to hook you on the book.

My Christmas Book Order from Barnes & Noble Arrives

Oh Joy, my daughter Kim sent me a $50 B & N gift certificate.  I had two choices:  buy one or one and one-half current books, or shop the remainder lists at B & N and buy a whole stack of great books that were printed a year or two ago.  As usual, I chose the latter course of action.  So I added eight books (not shown and not yet arrived:  The Ultimate Soup Bible) and two calendars for $57.  Is that a great bargain, or what?

Case Histories is a murder by Edinburgh author Kate Atkinson which the New York Times labeled as "so exuberant, so empathetic, that it makes most murder mystery page turners feel as lifeless as the corpses they're strewn with."  (Excellent and creative book review writing).  I bought this book for my wife to share the wealth, along with two calendars.

Infamous Scribblers surveys, in the words of one review "the surprisingly raucous journalism of the Revolutionary era and how it helped to build a nation that has endured . . . new perspectives on today's media wars."

Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations is a "tour of modern economics focusing on 'the new growth theory'. . . stories of high intellectual drama about the world of economic research."  I hereby assign this book as required reading for my two sons with economics degrees who both became lawyers and expect a book report ASAP.

Rising Tide:  The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America.  Title is self explanatory.  A New York Times notable book of the year.

Andrew Carnegie, at a mere nearly 1,000 pages, is viewed as the definitive biography of one of America's greatest entrepreneurs, involving "prodigious original research."  If I were still teaching reading courses to MBA students I would assign this book and expect it to be read in a week.  I'm not kidding.  We did several 1,000 page books.  The students may not have prepared for any other class, but they learned a ton reading the books I assigned.

The Rise of American Democracy:  Jefferson to Lincoln.  Self-explanatory.  Another massive book.

There are several ways to evaluate the economics of my book purchase.  Pages per dollar spent.  Number of books per $50.  Quality of book selections.  Probably the most important criterion is what I will learn from reading as many of these books as I can. 

 Newly acquired books are always more exciting than books that have been sitting in your already-existing book reserve or slush pile awaiting your reading.  Plus I downloaded a half-dozen free books on our Kindle e-book reader.  But then the so-called BCS championship game is tonight, and I'll need to watch at least the first quarter to see if anyone is going to run away with it.  I'll review these books again when I have read them.  Meanwhile, if any of these books appeal to you, you can order them for a song from B & N.

A Book to Read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Here is a book for you to read while the Curmudgeonly Professor is off to other lands and climes.  Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows have written an absolutely wonderful novel titled The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (New York: Dial Press, 2008).   The suggestion for reading this book is not a casual suggestion.  You are expected to buy and read this book and write comments on it before I get back.  The Curmudgeonly Professor is, after all, a professor and professors expect their students to read their assignments.

One reviewer wrote about this book:

I can't remember the last time I discovered a novel as smart and delightful as this one, a world so vivid that I kept forgetting this was a work of fiction . . .Treat yourself to this book please . . .

All you need to know is that the book is about a charming and sassy writer named Juliet Ashton who is looking for her next book subject in 1946 soon after World War II was over.  A native of Guernsey, a British channel Isle occupied by the Germans during the War, found Juliet's name on the flyleaf of a book of essays and initiated a correspondence with her.  This letter set in motion a chain of events that take us through recollections of the dark days of the occupation as we become acquainted with the indomitable courage and spunk of the Guernsey Islanders.  To tell you more would be a crime.  You must read the book to see whence comes the Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Happy reading, and don't forget to post your comment and your book report.  Don't delay, as you will soon have another assignment.

A Book to Read: The Singular Mark Twain by Fred Kaplan

The ghosts of Mark Twain, or perhaps of his biographer, have been hounding me for weeks to finish Fred Kaplan's biography titled The Singular Mark Twain (New York: Doubleday, 2003). I spent several months plowing through all of the 655 pages (hardcover edition) of the book, not because I was disinterested, but because I was digesting it in small increments. I love biographies that I become immersed in to the point that I feel that I am living the narrative, that I get to know the people being written about so well I can anticipate their actions, and have empathy for their misfortunes. The Singular Mark Twain is such a biography.

Like everyone, I read and reread Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn years ago. I was entranced by Tom Sawyer but never quite adapted to the dark side of Huckleberry Finn, not being sophisticated enough to realize that Huckleberry Finn was essentially not only a boyhood adventure but also a masterpiece about racial relations. Despite Huckleberry Finn being designated the major literary classic of the two, Tom Sawyer was still, and remains, my favorite. The other Twain book I read about thirty years ago was Life on the Mississippi, which made an indelible impression on me. You could easily feel you were on board many of these journeys up and down the river. I especially remembered Life on the Mississippi when, a decade later, I was asked to write an economic study of inland waterway transportation in the United States for the National Water Commission. No matter that my choice as a researcher and an author for this study was patently absurd, since I had only crossed the river a half dozen times and certainly had never floated down it on a barge, let alone a raft. Nonetheless, I immersed myself in a mountain of government documents, books, research monographs, and various trivia, and wrote a report which earned me an invitation to speak at the annual convention of the inland waterways trade group. And that speech and the report earned me an invitation to ride down the Mississippi with one of the officers of the organization, an invitation which I have forever regretted not being able to accept.

Good biographies help readers understand the complex nature of their subjects. In Twain's case, I learned about his constant cycle of writing, succumbing to a succession of lame-brained pie-in-the-sky business ventures--each of which Twain was certain would make him a multi millionaire, and desperate efforts to pay back his indebtedness. His debts, particularly for a typesetting machine he was certain would revolutionize the newspaper and printing industry but which failed miserably, led him repeatedly to the lecture circuit, including lecturing in countries throughout the world. We will never know what his literary output could or would have been had he devoted his life to writing and abandoned his ill-fated attempts to become rich.

Twain married the love of his life, Olivia Langdon, known as Livy, who began life in frail health and became a semi-invalid, and worse, throughout much of her life. One of their three daughters died young of meningitis. Another was epileptic. The third eventually married in Twain's old age. Mark Twain was ultimately left without heirs.

He began his married life first in Buffalo, then in an idyllic home built in Hartford, a home he was forced to abandon to a long exile in Europe because it was cheaper to live in Europe and the family was always seeking new medical skills and spas to alleviate their physical ailments. Twain seemed to think nothing of renting a villa here for a month or two or a year, a cottage there for another month, moving among countries with astonishing frequency. Twain crossed the ocean numerous times, some times with family, some times by himself, often to face problems induced by his indebtedness over failed business ventures.

Given the complexities of Twain's life, his time spent on searching for and supporting one daydream business venture after another, and his perpetual guilt, his literary output remains incredible. Beginning as a newspaper reporter and writer, his venture into both nonfiction and fiction, his skills as a humorist and lecturer, and his eccentricities of character, ultimately led him to become one of the most recognizable and famous people in the world, despite spending much of his life near or below the level of sustainable poverty.

I'm now going to try and read a few other of Mark Twain's works, and reread Tom and Huck, having gained a new appreciation for their author.

Abe Books: Another Bookseller That Can Help You Find Your Books

I can't remember who steered me on to Abe Books, but check out the link here. I can't imagine I've gone this long without knowing about Abe Books. They are a clearinghouse for 13,500 booksellers with an inventory of 110 million books. So add Abe Books to your Bookmarks or Favorites list, and happy book hunting.

Read a Book! October is National Book Month

How long has it been since you read a book? A real, honest-to-goodness book? And don't tell me you don't have time, that lame time-worn excuse. Teddy Roosevelt was a prolific reader, and I believe he had more going on than any of us have. I taught macroeconomics to Executive MBA classes for years. Some of my students were practicing physicians who wanted to know more about the economic forces affecting health care. Some were community leaders. Many engineers, teachers, and others from a wide variety of professions and occupations were in my classes. Some drove a round trip of several hundred miles two nights a week to come to class. What distinguished them all was their desire to learn, to read, and to gain new perspectives about themselves, their businesses, and their future careers. The fact that most of them worked long hours to begin with, had families and community and church responsibilities did not deter them from their quest to read and learn.

Often people don't know what to read or haven't thought about what to read for ages. I'll make a few suggestions. About.com casts a wide net across the world of learning and information and has several websites about books and reading. Here is one on classic literature that offers many suggestions. I started reading the New York Times Book Review each week nearly 60 years ago. Your librarian or bookseller can make suggestions. You can buy a Kindle reader from Amazon.com and carry a library of many books with you. You can browse bookstores or websites for Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, and other booksellers.

Readers read on the fly. They read while waiting. They turn the television off and read. They keep books stashed everywhere and go through a page or more here and there. They read during the 20 minutes of ads in a typical television hour program. They read a few minutes before turning the light off to go to sleep. They read on the bus, on the plane, on the commuter train, while waiting in line. They skip time-wasting activities and read instead. When my cardiologist noticed I was reading an interesting book several years ago while waiting for her, she has expected me every six months to furnish her with another reading list.

Here is an editorial titled "Read a Good Book Lately?" from Salt Lake's Deseret News of October 20 2008. According to the editorial, only 57 percent of people read books for pleasure. The editorial writer suggests starting by reading 15 minutes each night. Read to your children. Read to your spouse.

I'll offer just a short list of suggestions here:
1. Marco Polo by Laurence Bergreen (Vintage Paperback). A Washington Post best book of the year.
2. American Creation by Joseph Ellis. (Vintage Paperback). Ellis is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Founding Brothers. American Creation made the best books list for several major newspapers.
3. Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. (Vintage Paperback). One of the rave reviews for this book suggests:

Digital technologies are changing our kids in ways we don't yet understand. This beautifully written book will set the framework for a field that will change that. It is required reading for parents, educators, and anyone who cares about the future.

If you find a book to read and read it as a result of reading this blog post, please write me either at my email address or as a comment on this blog post. Maybe we can start a book and reading dialogue here. Oh yes, and watch the movie The Reading Room.