Books in the Pile!

What's in "the Pile" these days:

The Perfect Reader Maggie Pouncey
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (NF)
  Nicholas Carr
Mrs. Somebody Somebody Tracy Winn
Neighborhood Watch  Cammie McGovern
The Map  Brunonia Barry
61 Hours  Lee Child
Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds (NF)  Lyndall Gordon
Last Night in Twisted River  John Irving
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest  Stieg Larsson
The New Food Processor Bible (NF) Norene Gilletz
The Practical Naturalist (NF)  Audubon/Dorling Kindersley, publishers

(NF = non-fiction)


Now, keep in mind, this one stack of books will probaby take me several months to get through - considering I don't or can't really spend time reading until my kids are in bed.  Whenever I do manage to read during daylight hours - even for a few minutes - both the strangeness of it plus the attendant guilt that I'm not doing something "more important" get to me and I put the book down.  That, or I'm just interrupted so much that it's difficult to hold a thought.

I have started reading The Perfect Reader and The Shallows:What the Internet is Doing to our Brains.  Both are very good thus far, and Shallows has been both enlightening and intriguing as to the nature of the human brain and how it is affected/can be changed by the stuff we all do everyday. 

So, how do I go about finding good stuff to read?  Well, here is another photo:

This is a picture of the notebook I have been keeping, for the past few years.  I'm actually not sure how far this goes back!  I started this when I was still working at the library, because I would find so many books that looked good, but obviously just taking a book home doesn't necessarily mean it comes with the time to read it.  So I started keeping lists.  I also started reading two things:  "BookMarks" magazine, which my library carries and which is exclusively book reviews.  Very good magazine; I'd subscribe to it but at the moment, I'd rather save the money and use the local library.  I also read "Book Page" which is also available at the local library and is also solely reviews of books.  As I look through each publication and read the reviews I just write down the title and author of what looks interesting.

Then I go my library's website and just request a whole chunk of things at a time.  Just walking into the library and wandering around generally doesn't work, because what I have in mind to get probably isn't just on the shelf (like that Stieg Larsson book, that is never just on the shelf, it's too popular) - so then I just grab whatever.  And then the "whatever" I grabbed turns out to be poorly written and not worth my time.

So, now, I've got this whole stack of good stuff to read.  What are YOU reading these days?

Thanks for reading THIS!
Later,
Jen