Hiatus

Hello, little cadre of regular readers,

I expect blogging to be light for a while as I catch up on some reading and adjust to a new place of employment which will consume more time and attention than my present job.

After several years of blogging I find it hard to pay attention to books as I once did. My attention span has been injured. As I read a book, I sometimes want to interrupt my reading to see of anyone left a comment somewhere...but then I realize I'm not at the computer. It's maddening. Blogging is the reading and learning equivalent of junk food. It tastes wonderful, but you know it's filled with so much fat, salt, chocolate and grease that eating too much is not healthful.

I've been plowing through William Least Heat-Moon's Prairie Erth for six months and I'm only half way. (That one's like a box of cherry cordials...ingest slowly and savor every page...but that takes a lot of time. I keep it in one of the bathrooms.) It took me months to get through Virginia Postrel's The Future and It's Enemies last year. I've had Obama's Dreams From My Father for a week and have only passed Chapter Five. (Incidentally, he is incredibly introspective and analytical. If as president he received an alert that an emergency was occurring I think his first instinct would be to remain calm and move instantly to verify facts before reacting. I guess that's okay. No reasonable person would do less. Sometimes shooting from the hip is needed when a split-second delay might result in tragedy but those cases truly are rare.) I started Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building over a year ago and put it down, but I know I have to finish because the man who recommended it, an Oxford-educated naturalized American from Egypt whose judgement I respect, said it was good. Besides, Baheyya found it worth commenting about. On, and I also promised to blog a review Krista Tippett's Speaking of Faith in return for a complementary copy. Whew. This is almost like work.

Please excuse me. I have lots on my plate at the moment and will get back to serious blogging eventually. (Look for softballs and You Tube videos. I haven't given up candy and pretzels altogether.)