Guilty Pleasures

Um, yeah. All those smug people who've read through the whole bible just keep being smug.

Among other things, I've been reading lots of OTHER things, which pulls time and interest away from the "original plan" of this blog.

So, in the interests of reinvigorating things a little bit, let me tell you some of the stuff I've read. Feel free to start a new post about one of them if you want to talk about it.

I just finished "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco. If you're into medieval history and the Avignon Popes, there's a lot of that in there, along with Eco's very effective "getting into the heads" of monks of the time. If you're not into that kind of thing, I suspect it's an awfully plodding murder mystery. I liked it though.

I think I actually liked Baudolino (also by Eco, also set in the north of medieval Italy) better -- it was more tightly written, if I recall correctly.

Before that, I read Freakanomics, which has a lot of fun applications of statistics. It is written from an awfully arrogant perspective, though. I feel like I'm argumentative enough, you don't need to bait me more. But, like I say, the actual problems addressed are fun, and I feel like it might encourage people to discover that they have secret troves of useful data they didn't know they had. Doesn't actually seem to have much economics -- but maybe there's less non-math to economics than I thought. :)

Clearly, I need to read Eragon, which seems to have been all the rage, and I'm missing the bandwagon. I'm also keen to find out if Marvel's Civil War storyline is going to end as interestingly as it started (these big "events" seem to usually peter out depressingly). I couldn't resist finally getting a copy of Alan Moore's "From Hell", so that's on the "to be read" list too, along with volume 12 of Lone Wolf & Cub, which I also got on a whim. I suspect that the latter will be quicker to digest than the former.