I've had lots of down time, especially since my little accident, so have been reading a fair amount. Time to get back to studying Thai language.
by Firoozeh Dumas, finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor
by Bill Bryson. Among a million other things, I learned that the common North American bat eats 600 mosquitoes/hour. That a pillow used for 6 years will have 1/10th of its weight made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites and mite dung. And that in the early 1800s, it was fashionable (in England) to have a live-in hermit on your estate. One man in Surrey "signed a contract to live 7 years in picturesque seclusion, observing a monastic silence for £ 100, but was fired after 3 weeks when he was spotted drinking in a pub."
by Ha Jin about the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War.
by Tim Butcher
by BBC journalist and environmentalist Rory Spowers
Excerpt from last title:
"Looking at the scale and speed of the development on [Barbados] – the brash, almost vulgar opulence of the new hotels, the huge scars on the landscape where natural habitats had been cleared for yet another golf course, coral limestone excavated to build yet another sumptuous villa (only to be occupied by the owner once a year) – I began to reflect on the nature of wealth itself. Despite the material trappings, I wondered just how much better off the country was than 40 years ago.
Sure, most people were no longer toiling in the fields, or living in cramped wooden chattel houses. They were sitting in air-conditioned cars and concrete office cubicles, breathing recycled polluted air, working at the their computers, incubating road rage, suffering from soaring rates of cancer and adult onset diabetes from nitrate and pesticide run-off in the water and learning how to cope with stress, that peculiar modern phenomenon which technology and progress seem to have accentuated rather than diminished.
We had decided to move lock, stock and barrel, liberating ourselves once and for all from that lurking sense of responsibility for and ownership and storage of all that lay back home – be it house, or merely stored possessions rotting in some warehouse. The levels of stress had begun to ratchet up."
