The Book

No, not the bible, rather the thing that sits kattywhumpus on a table, leans at a funny angle when it doesn't have enough support from its friends, collects all sorts of crumbs, body hair, and coffee stains, gets rubbed raw at the edges, occasionaly torn and written in and fortunately, oh, so rarely, gets burned.

I have been a horrible book reader in my life.

By the age of 16, I think I had read (on my own, with no help from mum): Where the Wild Things Are, all the Curious George books, some of the Dr. Seuss books, James and the Giant Peach (wow, big step, eh!?), a few of the Narnia Chronicles (Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe, etc.) and topped it off with Conan the Barbarian (after I had seen the film, so no imagination necessary). I hated Dickens and anything else forced upon me in high school. Pathetic, eh?

I don't know what it is with books and me. Once I'm in a good one, I love it, but it's so hard to start a new one. I usually feel too busy to start...and this thing called the internet hasn't helped my behaviour, either. So, what's a lame-bookreader supposed to do? My friends always talk about the books they're reading (how do people read 3 or more books at once?), but I can't say they always enjoy what they're reading...so why bother? I really do like books, I want to read more, but I don't want to be stuck reading something so-so when I could be reading something wonderful. So, when I remember, I try to ask those book lovers what are/were their favorites (top 3 or 5 or 10, they often get flustered when asked to narrow it down so!). I then try to compile the lists of said favorites...if one or more people agree on the same title...bingo, we have a potential winner for me to add to my 'yeah, I'll hopefully read that one someday' list.

So what are your favorites? (feel free to enter in the 'comments' section at end of post)

So, what spurred this post? Well, this year's been good for me as far as book consumption goes. This summer I had a chance to read Lance Armstrong's Every Second Counts (while watching Le Tour de France in person, that was cool (le Tour was better than the book!)), the famed Da Vinci Code, the Dave Egger's Gen-X A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and the truly wonderful The Big Open, by Rick Ridgeway. (the latter was bought by Martin in Warsaw, passed on to Tessa in Trento, Italy, then passed to me this summer and returned to Warsaw!) 4 books in one summer, that's a lot for me. (Shows how much crappy weather we had in the mountains, too!)

But the latest is another gem for me, as thanks from Dawn for helping her move from one flat to another, she gave me Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. And it is. Really.

I like historical books, films and documentaries and this one tops the cake. His understanding of the sciences is as lame as the rest of ours (minus my dad) so he truly tries his best to convey in as simple of terms the history of us, the Earth and the universe. There's too many one liners of comedy and horror to post here now (maybe later), but here's a brief history of the earth if viewed as a simple 24 hour day (note: Earth is roughly 4,500,000,000 years old):

"Life begins very early, about 4 AM, with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. (!) Not until almost 8:30 PM, with the day 5/6ths over, has the Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed 20 minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia (see book). At 9:04 PM, trilobites swin onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 PM plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than 2 hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

"Thanks to 10 minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 PM the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 PM and hold sway for about 3/4ths of an hour. At 11:39 PM they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and 17 seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime, barely an instant.

"Throughout this greatly speeded-up day, continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flashbulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or larger (we're talking MASSIVE). It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummelled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long."

Us homosapiens really don't matter much in the cosmos, eh? But all things are reltive, right? But my dad was famous for once saying, "Relativity sucks!"

:)