Reacting to books

I fly to Arizona tomorrow, which means I need to think about packing. (Why did I love to pack so much as a child, but dread that as an adult?) True to form, I'm finding myself spending far more time thinking about the books and handwork I will bring rather than what clothes to pack. 

I think I have settled on two books. (Just 2! It may be some sort of a record.) I'm taking The Crook Factory by Dan Simmons, which I'm already one hundred pages into. It's about the counter-intelligence spy organization that Ernest Hemingway created in Cuba during WWII, so locate Nazi submarines. While it's fiction, based on the author's notes, the book is actually about 95% based on historical record, including documents previously undisseminated which the author received via FOIA. While it's been a bit slow to start, I think it is going to be very interesting, especially since this is a piece of history I know very little about. 

The other book I'm taking is Focus: The  Hidden Driver of Excellence by Daniel Golman. I've read his book Emotional Intelligence and liked it, so am looking forward to reading this one. Altogether that gives me about 550 pages of reading material. That should be okay for five days, including two plane trips, right? Or maybe I should throw in one more book....

But all this discussing of books makes me realize that I need to update you on two previous books I've mentioned. A couple of weeks ago I asked if I should keep reading The Frozen River, and several of you suggested I hang in there with it because the ending was very satisfying. So I did and I'm very glad I did so! The ending was extremely satisfying and I'm glad I stuck with it. I highly recommend it if you are looking for something to read.

The other book I've seen mentioning quite a bit was Radical Homemaking. I even shared quite a bit from it. I really loved the first half as it helped give me words for what I do that I hadn't quite been able to sort out on my own. 

And then I got to the second half, where she interviews various people who feel they fit into the radical homemaker niche. I had the exact opposite reaction to this half of the book. It rubbed all my hair the wrong way. I ended up doing quite a bit of skimming just to get through it. My issue with it is that the two halves didn't seem to match. The people she interviewed were, a lot of them, living on the edge of society. That's fine; I often don't feel I fit in and that I have different values. But an example was, while discussing affordable housing, was the woman who opted to squat in a building to save money so she could turn purchase a house. Or the section on affording healthcare, which pretty much involved people opting not to carry health insurance and using "natural" remedies instead. I just don't see these as actually viable options. But the kicker for me was when the author complains about the horrible healthcare options in the US, with the implication that the only option is to eat healthy and trust your luck.... but then turns around to praise all those European countries and his generally healthy they are. It's as if she hadn't actually read what she wrote in the first half or conveniently forgot that those healthy European countries have universal healthcare. 

Instead of implying that our government is always out to get us (pretend we're with the author in 2010 here and not presently when the government actually is out to get us), and thumbing our collective noses at it. Why not work on forming a community that really does care about the well being of all members and elect a government which will help with that? The disconnect and the paranoid suspicion of our government while holding up other countries with more social supports made me sputter. J. received the full brunt of the sputtering, I'm afraid.