Lisanne

Yesterday, I finished Oaxaca Journal by Oliver Sacks. If you don't recognize his name, he's the physician who wrote Awakenings, which was made into the movie. This book is the journal he kept on his trip to Oaxaca, Mexico. The trip was a tour for fern enthusiasts, so there is a certain amount of discussion of the ferns there and different types of ferns, but they also saw the ruins of some major ancient Zapotec cities and experienced modern-day Oaxaca as well. Yes, it's an intellectual group, and Sacks is himself a perceptive and reflective person, so many of the things they all talked about are academic, perhaps highbrow for some tastes. He is a great writer, so even when I wasn't as interested in a certain topic, he kept me reading. Overall, it's a very gentle, calming book to read. It left me with several things I looked up on the web afterwards - so it was thought-provoking, too.

Right now I'm reading a post-apocalypse science fiction novel called Faraday's Children. I bought it a few years back and hadn't read it. Now I'm a good way in. A natural phenomenon, something to do with a shift in magnetic fields, has caused floods and radiation. Some cities had enclosed themselves in domes, and two of these survived. Outside the domes, almost everyone died, though there are a few families who moved into tunnels, radiation-afflicted wanderers called Rangers and some farmer types called Aggies. The main character is a guy who flies his dad's old helicopter, a mail route between the Pittsburgh dome and a reclaimed dome in Erie, PA. He's been wanting more, to do some exploring, and the city officials finally grant him the permission to do so. So he's on his first trade and exploratory trip as the book starts.