Escaping with books (and why I don't watch the Olympics)

Have any of you been watching the Olympics? What are your favorite events?

I haven't really been watching. The reason for that is that it is so similar to striving for achievement in the professional music world that I need a break from the mentality of striving for perfection and achieving the ultimate performance. It's what I do every day. During my very first year at Oberlin just months into my college career, we were watching the fall Olympics in 1988. I remember saying with ultimate naivete, "I wish there was an Olympics in music." Without missing a beat, one of the wiser seniors named Robin Pyle, a trumpet player who now is a fabulous baroque trumpet player based out of Boston, quipped: "There is. It's called the real world." :) It would be years (and several auditions later) before I would fully realize the incisive and poignant truth buried in those words!

Well, since the Olympics have been monopolizing NBC, which airs 3 of the 4 shows I watch regularly (Law & Order CI, Law & Order SVU, and my absolute favorite, Crossing Jordan), I have had a lot more non-TV time. Which is a good thing. I've been reading a lot. I am thoroughly enjoying Cold Mountain; when I started it, I was worried I wouldn't because I'm not that into war novels. But this one is different; it actually includes women characters (what a concept), and delves a lot into the socioeconomic differences between the survivors who had to learn to cope with nothing (who end up being the strong ones) and the wealthy who never had to fend for themselves before the war and who have no coping skills and don't know how to take care of themselves. It's so interesting. It's truly an escape into a different time, a different world. I love that!

I haven't read a lot of non-fiction lately, and this Sunday at the book table at my church I bought a paperback that I cannot WAIT to read. It just looks absolutely fascinating and involves several hotbutton issues that I'm currently immensely interested in. It's called The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris, who is a philosophy graduate from Stanford and is now completing a doctorate in neuroscience studying the basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty. How fascinating! I might even start reading this one before I'm finished with Cold Mountain just for variety.

So what are you reading these days? (Click on "Comments" below and select "Anonymous" if you don't have a blogger account)

XO Darcy