Gratitude: Day 8

Wishlists. Especially Amazon. It's not just for buying things, it helps me organize books I plan to check out at the library as well.

Oprah

I was listening to a local radio show about books when this came up:

Person A: What do you think of Wally Lamb's new book?
Person B: It's amazing. He's one of our best local authors in Connecticut.
Person A: The book is set during the time of Columbine and seems so authentic.
Person B: Here's a story about Wally Lamb that a lot of people don't know. When his first book started to get a lot of attention he got a call at school from Oprah. He picked up the phone and said, "Oprah, I can't talk to you. There's been a calamity." And he hung up on her. What had happened was a driver reaching for his beer* ran over two students and killed them. And Wally Lamb, as the school's director, felt he needed to be there for the family and help take care of the situation. Just a noble, noble man.
Person A: Yes, a noble man.

Dude, come on. That's not noble. That would be the decent thing to do.

I've really got to stop listening to local talk radio.

*In Connecticut it's completely legal to have an open can of liquor in your car.

In a book and on the radio

I heard two food related things today that I thought were interesting:

1) A friend suggested the book In Defense of Food. I read a passage today that really stuck with me:

"Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing...The epidemiologist John Powles has suggested this predilection is little more than a Puritan bias: Bad things happen to people who eat bad things."

It does seem like a historically negative take on diet and nutrition.

2) NPR noted that people tend to eat in front of the TV but people tend not to eat while listening to the radio. They went on to suggest that radio might just be good for your health.

Funny, but there is probably some truth to it.

Counting down books

Even though I have yet to finish my list of books to read for the year, I've already started thinking about what I'm going to be reading next year.

There is one big question on my mind right now...

Should I devote one whole year to reading all seven volumes of Proust? Or should I read one volume each year for the next seven years?