Summer Reading
It’s been established that Melissa is the more voracious reader of the two of us — I’d be embarassed to calculate the ratio of the books she’s read since we started dating to the books I’ve read since we got together, and avid readers of the blog will note that she is the only one who ever updates the “Now Reading” section. However, a month or so ago we made a trip to The Regulator, a Durham independent bookstore, and I bought a bunch of books in hopes of improving my numbers. Right now I’m in the midst of Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which I bought because the cover looked cool and the title was neat and I think I’d heard of it somewhere, and I am already three quarters of the way through it, and this is impressive! After I finish, I know that Melissa wants me to read I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe, because she is dying to have someone to talk to about it, and I have discouraged her from talking about it so far, because I don’t want her to ruin it for me. I like Tom Wolfe, a lot — I remember snagging The Right Stuff from my parents’ bookshelf when I was young, and then reading it again when I was older, and I also enjoyed A Man in Full and Hooking Up, a book of short stories. The bad news for Melissa is that, before I’m done with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, I am likely to receive two other books I ordered — Ambient Findability and Everything is Miscellaneous. These are non-fiction books, which I know Melissa secretly frowns upon for leisure reading; worse, they are geeky books, and so we will see how I negotiate this delicate situation.
