Hiatus

This morning, after going to Sunnyside Restaurant for an unusually heavy breakfast with Moira, I returned The Innocents Abroad to Deer Park library (a day overdue again!).  I'd tried to renew it, but someone placed a hold on it, so I placed a hold on another copy at a more remote branch and will resume reading it once that arrives.

While waiting for its arrival, I'll start reading the latest Lapham's Quarterly, whose subject is revolutions.  Every issue has a map of the world illustrating its theme just after the table of contents, and this one showed the locations of over two hundred revolutions, rebellions, coups and wars of independence through history.  I was patient enough to find the location for every entry in the chronological list! (Names like the January Rebellion are hardest to find.) Now I look forward to going on Wikipedia and reading about the Ragamuffin War and the Green Corn Rebellion.  I'm also reading an interesting article in Harper's about how the Colorado River basin's water resources are being relentlessly overtaxed.

I just got about two-thirds of the way through the book:  the tour has just reached Samaria.  Mark Twain didn't think much of the Holy Land, characterizing it as desolate and impoverished.  The first time I saw the book quoted was as a high schooler attending a United Nations Seminar at Mt. Allison University.  One of the booklets they gave us was a work of Israeli propaganda called Myths and Facts. (Is my memory playing a trick, or was the author future CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer?) The title reflects its running structure.  Myth:  the Arab position followed by Fact:  the Israeli position.  They quoted The Innocents Abroad to argue that the place was a dump before the Zionists took over.  Sort of like America before the First Nations were robbed of their land.

For future reading, I've been buying books at the Chapters-Indigo website.  In my quest to read all the Classics Illustrated novels, I bought three French books: Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, Edmond About's The King of the Mountains, (about 19th-century tourists getting kidnapped by a Greek bandit--it's funnier than it sounds), and Erckmann and Chatrian's Waterloo.  The last is a two-book volume which includes The Conscript, which Waterloo is a sequel of.  I bought them because I've read the comics version of all three.

I also bought a collection of Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction short stories.  Next month's ROLT event will be about science fiction, and I plan to read either his The Sentinel (the official source material for Stanley Kubrick's 2001:  A Space Odyssey) or Encounter at Dawn (an unofficial source).

I think my posts are getting longer!  That's a good sign.