I’ve never been much of a reader. Typically, I take in magazines, non-fiction, and a whole bunch of blogs. Rarely, if ever, do I sit down with fiction, but this year (thanks to a fall that is keeping me off of my bike for another three weeks) I actually managed to finish Faulkner’s Light in August. Yeah, it took, oh, maybe 18 months (I don’t even remember when I started it), but it’s inspired me to stick to a more regular reading schedule. Over Thanksgiving, I tore through Moneyball and The Areas of My Expertise.
Right now, in the “To-read” pile, Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the new Creationism is at the top. I picked this up at the MIT bookstore in September, and while it’s a pretty dry read (it is mostly an academic philosophy book), it explains a lot about the current war being raged against reality by Creationists/Intelligent Design proponents.
After a discussion on the dRc board, I realized I still hadn’t made it over to Strawberry Fields (terrible name! The 4th “Strawberry Fields” shop in Denton in the last 40 years, according to Martin Iles), a relatively new “media” store at the corner of Oak and Bonnie Brae (former site of el Pariente). So, I walked down there last night to have a visit and walked about with about $70 worth of stuff.
The book selection is pretty small; there are a lot of Loompanics and drug-related books there, with a smattering of underground and “alternative” fiction and some political stuff. I picked up The Zapatista Reader, a reprint of an old Smith College text called Native American Anarchism, and The Diary of a Teenage Girl.
If the book selection was small, the music selection was teeny-tiny (maybe 50 titles or so), though it was mostly good-quality stuff. I picked up Danielson’s Ships, which I should have snaked in Hasselt, but there ya go.
The DVD rental selection is, again, small but pretty good, and their rental plans ($25/mo for unlimited rentals, or $2/vid for days) are definitely reasonable. Anyone who hasn’t seen the Cane Toads documentary would be well advised to drop by.