Five Days. Gone.

I had five days off. I have to go back to work tomorrow. I love my job, it's okay, but having five days off was pretty sweet.

I read a lot...  finished Unholy Night by Seth Grahame-Smith (Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). The book maps out the night of Jesus' birth from the POV of one of the wise men, and relates how he really came to meet Mary, Joseph and Jesus. I don't know how God-fearing Seth is, but his Herod is one of the most loathsome I've ever come across.


I was kind of surprised by how much I enjoyed that, and I think that Seth is an undervalued writer. Maybe it's because I'm a Canadian that I don't get snooty enough about taking such liberties with Lincoln. I don't like romance novels and old romance novels don't charm me any more than the new ones do. There's nothing wrong with artistic license if it's smart, entertaining and just a tiny bit believable. 


Geoff passed along The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, written by Tom Wolfe. Written in 1968, this is a journalistic 'account' of the author's encounter(s) with the Merry Pranksters, a group of counterculture artists and others led by Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). As near as I can tell so far, anyway, I've just started.

I'm also halfway through 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang. Chang is an economist and professor at the University of Cambridge. He's teaching me a lot. This has been the most approachable and enjoyable book about economics I've ever taken a stab at. I'd recommend it to anybody. The gist: capitalism, and the free market system on which this ideology is based, does not work in the long term. Marvelous.


More later, including books...