2891! Whoo-hoo!

Feeling guilty because I have neither read nor reviewed nor posted lately. On the other hand, I did drive 1000 miles this week! Drove up to upstate NY on Thursday to pick up my son from music camp, attend two concerts and turn around on Friday afternoon and drive 11 hours home, arriving at 3 AM. Actually, I thought about getting a book on tape -- it seemed like the correct, dutiful thing to do, but lately I'm finding that it all seems like work. I've still got two articles to write, one manuscript to review, one book to review, and a conference paper to get done in the next month or so, as well as two classes to teach, etc. etc. etc. Not much time for extracurriculars.

And i've just been SO darned compelled by the last book I did read. It's called "a world made by hand" and it's the latest in an emerging genre called 'post-apocalyptic fiction'. It basically describes one summer in upstate NY after the nuclear explosion, death of everyone important in government, cut off of all utilities in the US, end of the internet, end of all supplies of natural gas and oil and thus all transportation outside your village, and the successive plagues that have swept through the area taking about forty percent of the population with them. So far me, my husband and my son have succumbed to the spell of this particular book where nothing particularly scary happens -- it's not like Steven King where we all turn into zombies or something. It's more about how your life would change if all of a sudden everything you were was gone (executive, business trips, vacation homes, etc.) and you were still living in your old house where you no longer had cable or electricity and you were reduced to the level of a subsistance farmer living in Rwanda. How would your marraige change? your relations with your neighbors? Your sense of self? Your community? How would you think about the future and your own past? I confess. I read the book twice and will probably read it again. Between that and the latest by Jennifer Weiner, I am finding it unable to take on any new reading -- these books are just so compelling.

My new neighbors on the chart up are intriguing: One is a messianic jew who's into bellydancing, and the other is a guy obssessed with cults. what do you think of that?