Just returned from a week of vacation. It's been the first vacation I can remember where our explicit goal was not to have any particular goals. Just lots of being together, sleeping late, beach and pool, afternoon naps, reading, a party and a few dinners with relatives.
I wanted to bring an instrument, but couldn't find my easy-playing alto recorder on the way out the door, so I grabbed my clarinet and toodled on it all week. I divided my reading time between Chesterton's Complete Father Brown stories (for the beach) and Will Durant's excellent classic Story of Philosophy, still in print after 75+ years (I'm up to Spinoza after 15 years of desultory reading).
There was a book sale at the local public library, and among the vast flotsam of embossed-cover beach reading spread out on the library lawn I found a few gems:
- The first edition of Gwendolyn Brooks' The Bean Eaters, apparently curiously withdrawn from library circulation after four checkouts 1965-7, surfacing now just in time for me to scoop it up. Here's a Usenet post I did in 1993 that mentions her poem We Real Cool, which is in The Bean Eaters. And while we're in the dusty Usenet attic, here's another little old poem.
- Symbolism, by Alfred North Whitehead -- three Barbour-Page Lectures from 1927 (more on this later)
- The Spirit of Zen by Alan Watts
- A volume of A Study of History by Arnold Toynbee
More on my reading list, ordered mostly used from various sources via Amazon and still arriving:
- Borges Selected Non-Fictions
- Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God by Jack Miles
- Information Theory by Robert Ash (very technical, it turns out).
Will I ever finish Wolfram's tome? Realistically, not for a long time. These others are calling stronger.