If it's the day after Christmas, I must be sorting books.
Yesterday, Angie and I exchanged packages of equal size and heft. She paused, held them together, wrapping against wrapping -- she suspected. After almost 19 years of friendship, it's not only amusing but unsurprising that we would eventually buy each other the same gift -- in this case Nick Hornby's <i>The Polysyllabic Spree</i>, a collection of essays outlining the books he's bought and read month to month.
I didn't collect many books this holiday season -- the Hornsby book, Jon Stewart's <i>America</i> and a few gardening tomes -- but as I sorted the shelves today, I found myself staring at a three-foot pile of unread books. Aeschylus, Donna Tartt, Romeo Dalliare. Books on organization culture and business. Reams of poetry, and essays on poets. Massive tomes unveiling the lives of Thurgood Marshall, Desmond Tutu. I try not to tell myself that I will breeze through any of them in the coming week away from work, but perhaps...
What has captured my attention in December, as far as books are concerned, is an odd melange of material -- Kenneth Pollack's <i>Persian Puzzle</i>, <i>How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work</i>by psychologist Robert Kegan, Sheryl Nissinen's <i>The Conscious Bride</i> and a new Star Trek novel by Peter David. I've been tackling these, and the Hornby essays, amidst a scattered magazine or three -- the new Paste (worth purchasing just for the DVD of short films and music videos), the annual end-of-year Economist (the least interesting such volume they've produced in a decade), Newsweek, Poet & Writer, the Utne Reader and Cooking Light.
Pollack and Kegan have been the most interesting of the batch -- one an exploration of the on-again, off-again U.S./Iran relationship and its consequences for national policy, and the second a guided exploration of how the ways we engage problems and hold contradictions can be transformational.
The challenge of the coming week will be the avoid the growing list of new books scribbled on scraps of paper around the house, and focus on trimming away at the existing stack. Or to tackle any of the many other lists scattered about -- pieces of poems, small repair jobs around the house, winter landscaping duties, work-related projects. Or, perhaps, to begin a new list of things I've chosen not to do this last week of 2004.
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