Thanks in part to the reading challenge in Jacqui’s Room, this has been a summer of books. The list of works I’m pursuing for that quest has been blogged about before – thus far I’ve managed Don Quixote, The Great Gatsby, and Slaugherhouse-Five. Still reading (and enjoying) Moby Dick – like Cervantes, it’s enjoyable (to me, anyway); it’s just taking a long time.

In the meantime, I have countless other book waiting for me. I loaned a colleague my copy of a favorite, Carter Beats the Devil, and was immediately loaned The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, with The Mulligan thrown in for good measure – a novel by a Minnesota dentist about a Minnesota dentist who leaves his “good life” and heads West (or so I gather). I also have battered copies of Leaves of Grass (which may replace Blood Meridan in my reading challenge list) and selected tales from The Arabian Nights, plus Elmer Keith’s Hell, I Was There and The Tao Te Ching waiting for me.

At work, it’s two of my boss’s favorite books, E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered and the Lincoln biography Team of Rivals. Plus, we went to a great day-long seminar by Yale professor emeritus Edward Tufte and received four of his beautiful books – then a friend bought me a copy of Tufte’s mom’s book Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. And this doesn’t scratch the surface of speech writing, leadership, higher education, and public policy books growling from the shelves.

Downstairs? Susanna Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu is calling. Perhaps this winter …