BiblioAddict

Ah, my beautiful blog, how I’ve missed you so! Oh the trials and tribulations I’ve suffered: no internet – or rather my refusal to pay $13 dollars a day for connection at the hotel (I’m sorry, I love you but I don’t love you that much) – a canceled flight, a three hour wait in the customer service line only to be turned away, another wait in another line only to be told that the only flight leaving for D.C. that day was at 10 p.m. with a two-hour layover in Philadelphia and an arrival time in D.C. at 8:30 a.m. the following morning. Suffice it to say that I am, without a doubt, very happy to be home. Though I love my job, I’m also very happy that I won’t be traveling anywhere for work for next two months.

But you don’t want to hear about that, I’m sure. You want to know just what I read during the week I dropped off the radar and the twelve hours I spent in a traveler’s daze at LAX. Well, I finally finished Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Comments and thoughts will be posted later this week but Entertainment Weekly has an interview with Hamid here for anyone who’s interested. I’ve also started reading Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, which is turning out to be an excellent follow-up to The Reluctant Fundamentalist. They’re the immigrant stories of two characters who couldn’t be more different.

And if you’re thinking that I must have, after twelve hours of wandering aimlessly around LAX, purchased a new book (or two) in the airport, well then you’re right. I was bored, and the very first thing I like to do when I’m bored but too restless to sit still long enough to read a book, is to buy a book, which is what I did. I finally got around to buying The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier.

This book and I have been on a pick-me-up/put-me-back-down relationship for quite some time now and finally, I relented. The premise – a slowly dwindling city populated by the recently dead who exist only as long as the people on earth remember them, and a scientist stranded somewhere in Antarctica who very well may be the last human on Earth after a deadly virus wipes out the population – sounded intriguing and seemed to fit my mood at the moment.

I’ve also been reading like mad to finish This I Believe, my June New Notions 5 Challenge pick. How did June pass so quickly? I haven’t the faintest idea where this month went but it appears that, if I want to finish this book by the end of the month, I need to pick it up. Thankfully, it’s not a bad read. In fact, it’s a very inspiring read; it’s the kind of read that makes me happy to be a member of the human race. It reminds me that we are capable of so much – so much bad, yes, but also so much good and so much understanding.

But I’m in danger of going off into an idealistic rant, so I’ll stop here. Well, that’s my weeks worth of reading. And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming…