Reading and Listening

I finished I Am Legend. It's fantastic. It ends just like it should, a rarer thing than ought to be.

My current stack of reading material is by my bed as I write this. It is:

Decoding The Universe -Charles Seife. This has been on my list for the longest amount of time. It's heady stuff, and not to be cruised through. As accessible as physics gets which, for me, is still difficult to sift through.

What Jesus Meant -Garry Willis. Excellent book of devotional reading, not unlike Shusaku Endo's Life of Jesus. Very accessible, very short, and very good.

Envy -Yuri Olesha. An Adam Sweeney recommendation. He has yet to steer me wrong. This book is great fun, a chance to engage the Russian writers without having to commit to 700 pages.

The Professor and the Madman -Simon Winchester. Winchester's written all sorts of award winning non-fiction. This is about how the Oxford English dictionary was created. It sounds dull. It's not. One of it's main contributers (more than 10,000 entries) was WC Minor, who was also criminally insane.

The Ongoing Moment -Geoff Dyer. Another Wellington recommendation (his have been more recent, but just as consistent as Sweeney's). This is a look at canonical figures of photography. Since I know as much about photography as I do about physics, I look forward to working my way through it.


I am listening to Bruce Springsteen's Devil's and Dust a lot. I'm struck by how amazing this album is. Jesus Was An Only Son is an amazing song, and particularly striking as Good Friday draws near.

Also listening to the new Ted Leo and Andrew Bird. Both excellent. Leo is angrier (lyrically and musically) than he has been of late, Bird is as interesting and pleasant as ever. Both of these are great. I'm also taking in the Robert Pollard (Guided By Voices) solo work. It's great.

That's what I got this week. I'll probably have Envy and What Jesus Meant knocked out by next week. I'll let you know how they were.