Thursday, November 10, 2005

"You read the weirdest things"

. . . or so I was told Tuesday while working at the precinct. Considering who spoke those words, I don't think the comment was meant unkindly; at any rate, my choice of reading material that day was certainly more appropriate than that of the worker who brought in Ann Coulter's latest. He must have assumed keeping the book face down on the table in front of him squared with the oath we take not to attempt to influence any voter's decisions, although he did read aloud from the book once when there was a voter in a booth. Of course, the read-aloud session was at the prompting of our Republican judge, so that makes it all Perfectly Okay.

Feh.

I have a between books feeling since finishing Desert Solitaire and reading all of The Solace of Open Spaces during the election. Walden is still in progress, but I want to have something else going as well. Maybe I'll start This House of Sky tonight, or maybe I'll wait for Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad to come in at the library--probably by the weekend.

We're watching Robert Sapolsky's lecture series on Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality. Ours is the first edition, with only eight 45-minute lectures; already I'm grieving that we don't have this expanded version with discussion of brain evolution and ethology and various perspectives on behavior because Sapolsky is just as engaging and incredible a speaker as he is a writer. S. is reading Monkeyluv now because of the lectures; I'll read it once he's done.

Last night our student worker had a question about drones--are they really born of unfertilized eggs?--and I offered to go up in the tower to retrieve a book about bees that I read a good ten years back: The Queen Must Die by William Longgood. A title on the shelf above it snagged my attention:Parrot Culture. (The library always strips books of their jackets before placing them in general collections, so the cover Amazon shows was a complete surprise.) It begins with Alexander the Great's first exposure to parrots; our Trevor is in build, although not in color, simply a miniature Alexandrine parakeet, although I have babysat the real deal.

There's an article in the Christian Scientist Monitor on Library Thing.

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