This week I’ve been busy homeschooling and house cleaning, so I’ve slacked off on my usual reading. Here are the current top-most items on my perpetual bedside pile:
- Well, I haven’t dug in to Survivors [1], yet. (It had been next on my list.) However, Jim was previewing its second season of the television series this past week, and as I was passing by him in the office, I stopped and watched the first ten minutes with him. The show was very intense and dramatic. So I am suspecting that the book is just as dramatic as the show. I’m presently not in the mood for that much drama. The Survivors novel will have to wait for another time.
- Three nights ago, I was unable to sleep so I whipped out my LED Mini-MagLite and scanned my book pile. I picked up the book Tomorrow, When The War Began [2] and began reading it by flashlight. This novel, by Australian author John Marsden was ostensibly written for the “Young Adult” market, but I think that most adults will reading enjoy it. Without giving away too much of the story, it is about a foreign invasion in the near future, and the beginnings of a war of resistance, a la the movie Red Dawn [3]. This is the first book of a series of seven. It is a useful survivalist book with good information that anyone could glean from. Since the book is written from the viewpoint of a high schooler telling of her experience during her country’s invasion by a foreign power. There is a lot of high school drama: romance/pairing up, mild talk of fornicating behaviors, talk of drug use, etc. The style of writing is mildly annoying to me, since it is a bit convoluted, especially in the first half of the book. I personally don’t recommend it for teenagers, because the culture described is not a lifestyle I wish to promote or expose our young people to. I don’t plan to read the rest of the series. There are better books out there to read.
- Jim and I recently started watching the early 1990s television series Northern Exposure [4]
on DVD. It is a “fish out of water” comedy. This quirky show is about a young New York City Jewish doctor, who to fulfill a contractual agreement, reluctantly moves to Alaska to be a general practitioner in the fictional town of Cicely.(The outdoor scenes were actually filmed in Roslyn, Washington [5].) I really enjoy the witty dialogue between the characters. Jim and his late wife (The Memsahib) had missed seeing most of the series when it originally aired, because they had just moved to the wilds of Idaho, sans television. Fast forward 20 years, and Jim is again living in the boonies (after a brief stint in the corporate world), and he still doesn’t have (or desire) a television. Despite the fact that the first season of the series aired in 1990, it holds up fairly well. There are few raunchy references, but no seriously foul language. It is definitely not a show for kids. Some of the characters in the show definitely remind us of our neighbors. The Rawles Ranch [6] is in a very remote region, and believe-you-me, we have some neighbors that are real characters.
- First thing in the morning, lunch time and in the evening, I check e-mails and do a bit of web and blog surfing. Some of my favorite sites to check regularly are Rural Revolution [7], Paratus Familia [8], The Drudge Report [9], World Watch Daily (Koenig International News) [10], and Chuck Baldwin [11]. I am very keen on keeping up with international and national news.