Book 14 makes me feel stupid!

I would review this book of 4 essays by Henry David Thoreau but I seriously can only sound stupid so I will just list some of the things that stood out to me.

1) I have never used a dictionary this much in my life.

2) This book was 90 pages long and in the time I read it I read 5 other books.

3) Civil Disobedience is a lot of commitment.

4) I should use my middle name if I ever publish something.

5) Dover thrift editions are the best thing about historically based vacations.

6) I have a Dover thrift edition of "The Souls of Black Folk" by W.E.B. DuBois and it is almost 200 pages so I will be done reading that this November.

Slow Down it's Good for You!

In Praise of Slowness is one of the most thought provoking books I have read in quite a while. Carl Honoré begins as an optimistic skeptic to the slow movement and takes you on his journey to mild believer in the core tenets of slow living. I was first introduced to the ideas of slow living by a friend of mine that at that time was an amazing cook as a hobby. He is now the owner/manager/lead chef at one of the hippest and most influential restaurants in Lincoln, Nebraska. His restaurant, Bread&Cup, is founded on many of the ideas of the slow food movement as well as slow living. Kevin himself is a slow paced, thought-filled, always contemplating larger issues kind of man, and I always admired that about him. To give you a glimpse of his life in the time I spent with him he; made his own cheese from bacterial cultures he ordered online, taught me to make bread, recorded his own album in a basement studio he built, grew an amazing garden from started plants he grew in his basement during the Lincoln winters, read non-stop, composed original electronic music (down-tempo of course) and managed to always have a new recipe in the works. You may be thinking that doesn't sound like slow living but it was. That was the beauty of Kevin and the ultimate goal of the slow movement. Slow living is not about being boring or resting all the time, or about having a low stress job. It is about taking time to enjoy life. This means savoring your meals, meals you made at home, with friends, and enjoyed for hours over conversation. It means never rushing in love, taking time to enjoy your spouse. It means listening to Beethoven's 7th Symphony 75 times and on the 75th time hearing that small viola part you never noticed that changes everything you thought about the piece before that moment. It means reading slower, and discussing what you read with people. It means riding your bike, or riding the bus, or God-forbid walking somewhere.
I can't say I am the new leader of the slow movement in Tucson, but I can say I am making strides to live at my pace, to say no to things I don't want to be doing and to spend long amounts of time in the things I do want to be doing. Nothing that Carl Honoré says is ridiculous but our American mind wants to think it is. Slowing down and enjoying life almost seems unpatriotic, but no one has ever accused me of being a patriot.

10, 11, and 12

So, I got a little behind on my updates so her is the latest news. I am pretty much right on pace with 12 books read in 3 months so I am feeling good about this. I usually read a lot more in the summers because it is pretty much too hot to do anything outside. The three books I knocked off were All Quiet on the Western Front which I will sum up this way; I don't like war, I don't plan on liking war, this did not help the situation any. I think if we forced people to read books like this they would be a lot less eager to fight over fossil fuels and imaginary lines in the middle of nowhere. So pretty much if WWI had actually been the war to end all wars that would have been nice. Next I read The Truth About You It may very well be bull, I'm not sure so someone else read it and let me know what you think. Lastly I just finished another look on poverty. This time I read Out of Poverty by Paul Polak. I read this because I knew the other was a little more radical than some of the other authors I have read who discuss ending poverty. Polak was much more extreme in his stance than I would ever be. He is very against foreign aid. I understand where he is coming from, many nations are dependent on aid and never fix there problems they just wait for the next boat full of money to show up. But there must be a give and take, and anyway generally speaking the wealthy have too much money anyway so we should give aid to impoverished nations just to force the world's wealthy to quit hogging all the cash. It was, however, interesting to read something by someone that I would consider extremely liberal in his solutions to poverty, I was raised by socialists, I don't come across that every day.