“I fear one day I'll meet God, he'll sneeze and I won't know what to say.” - Ronnie Shakes

The plague! Time travel! String theory and paradoxes! What more could you possibly want in a book? Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book is exactly the sort of book I love most. It’s got wonderful characters with whom I would like to hang out, it’s got some futuristic elements that are just far-fetched enough to make it sci-fi but just NOT far-fetched enough to make it thoroughly believable. (No involved, stretching-credibility explanations needed for the sci-fi elements, in other words.)
And the plague! Who doesn’t love the plague? *I* love the plague.
I have a feeling I’d be one of those people with natural immunity (no, no desire to test that theory), and so I’d be nursing people and digging graves and arranging quarantines.
I deal very well in a crisis.

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I have broken my reading-from-my-shelves vow to request Melanie McGrath’s The Long Exile: A tale of Inuit betrayal and survival in the high Arctic from the local library. The boys and I have a carton of books to return; I must finish Silver on the Tree as it was due back three days ago. And due to some research I was doing for a patron, I am now burning to read Alexandra Robbins’ Pledged: The secret life of sororities.

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I took the boys to B&N Wednesday afternoon for a children’s activity having to do with designing and making your own book. Wednesay’s theme was the Titanic; it seems that the whole program is following the Magic Tree House book series. At the end of the summer, the pages and book jackets the kids create will be displayed at a reception, and a raffle held for a signed copy of Mary Pope Osborne’s newest Magic Tree House book, Monday with a Mad Genius. (I preferred my first attempt before I looked up that title: Mad Man on Monday. Sounds like a follow-up to that Duran Duran song we all knew and loved – ahem – “New Moon on Monday.”)

Primo carefully used black paint impasto to capture the swirling, angry, and icy cold North Atlantic; Seg glued cotton balls to his paper for the iceberg. I love the way their brains work.

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Dudes, I clearly need some sort of book meme to round out this post. But I haven’t got one. Sorry. (Although Jess’s thoughts of compiling food references in her favorite books is compelling.)

The End.