Reading

I've spent most of the day doing the intense reading that is necessary for text editing. I'll be glad when this is over. I even changed my "postcard display" from inspiring castles to postcards of women at work. (Yes, gardening counts as work). That picture of me is at Alcatraz, reading Lyotard - must have been taken in mid- 1990s. It was part of a series of photos called "scholar at work." I must hunt up some of the others and make a display-- though I hardly call the editing work I'm doing at the moment, as truely "scholarly."

But I have also been reading other texts. Yesterday I finished a novel, "The diary of Mattie Spenser." It was OK -- written well, but the story of prairie home life during the depression really didn't engage me, and the clues as to the dark side of the story were far too obvious for my taste. The one advantage was that the size of the book was a bit smaller than normal, and it was very comfortable to hold to read in bed! Then I read about Politico and Playbook in Washington from Sunday's Times while I was exercising -- now that's a world completely alien to me. And, for breakfast I selected, "A case for those extra 10 lbs." from today's Wall Street Journal. I thought for sure it would be the most emailed article, but somehow news of Goldman Sachs won that honor! And in-between times I've been skimming my cookbooks to try to find the recipes for the pies in the alphabet bake-off. So I have Fannie Farmer, The Joy of Cooking, and pages copied from the library copy of the Complete Book of Pies on my desk, and my browser set to pie recipes online for those I made while in Florida.

And, as if that isn't enough, I've been steeling myself to begin reading the AASCB Standards again, in preparation for my phone conversation with my Swedish contact tomorrow.

No wonder I feel as if I have been reading ALL day!