summer reading

Marie and I have started this summer “bookclub”. I put that in quotes mainly because we’re the only members and none of this is going to be very official. Probably just Marie and Amara reading books and talking about them on the beach/at the kitchen table/on the couch. Anyways, the booklist so far is:

• Huck Finn (which we are reading right now)
• Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
• In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

We want to read a lot of classics; things we read in highschool but due to crappy teaching, didn’t get much out of at the time. I think we had mentioned adding some Faulkner, Nabokov (probably Crime and Punishment), and probably Anna Karenina (this is probably a stretch since it’s a really huge book…not quite something I would take to the beach) I also wanna read DeLillo’s newest, Falling Man.

So, this brings me to the question: what are YOU reading right now?? I need recommendations and ideas.

check it twice

A wise man once said that it’s never too early to start your Christmas list. AMEN.

“The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research-based educational organization that produces public programs about the built landscape of the United States from its sites in Los Angeles, Utah and the Mojave desert, with an upstate New York location opening in 2006. The Center’s aim is to increase and diffuse information about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived. Recent examples of their work include a two-day Tour of the Monuments of the Great American Void by bus and the exhibit Immersed Remains: Towns Submerged in America. This book takes readers on a tour through the strangely unfamiliar land that Americans live in, demonstrating that we can understand ourselves and the nation by examining the clues on display all around us, often clearly visible but ignored. Each chapter explores a different topic, from an in-depth look at Ohio (“the most all-American state”); through scale shifts in model landscapes, exemplified in the three largest hydraulic models in the world; and law-enforcement training environments that simulate public space. Readers can dive into the hidden and enchanting world of show caves, where America is on display underground; and come up into the Great Basin, a zone covering most of Nevada, and portions of Utah, California, Oregon, Idaho and Mexico, whose network of watersheds has no outlet to the ocean. Following lines and edges, through cities, suburbs, small towns and wide-open spaces, the Center guides us upstream, toward the heart of another America—the same, but different.”