Reading

It's June 13 at about ten in the morning, and the temperature is 48 degrees and raining. Been this way all weekend.

I finished reading A Walk Across America. I enjoyed it, but the last two chapters were just awful. The author is a terrible writer, but I overlooked that because I was really fascinated by his adventure. Then, surprisingly, this church-avoiding, long-haired, earth-loving hippie type "finds God" when he drops into a mega-revival in Alabama. It was all a little too suspicious and weird, as were the events the followed. For the tale of his adventures, I'd give it 4/5 stars. For everything else - his lack of writing skills, his inability to tell a decent story, and his weirdness to name a a few things - a mere 1/5 stars. He's got a second book which he wrote after walking through Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico and ultimately settling for a time in Ouray, Colorado, but it got worse reviews than his first. He's also got a book about Alaska, which more readers seemed to enjoy, and a fourth about some other country which I didn't pay much attention to. I'm not sure I'll be reading anything else by Peter Jenkins.

Seeing as it's cold and rainy - perfect for curling up in my pj's by the fire with a book - I started the next one, The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is a very accomplished writer whose books focus on evolution and genetic inheritance. The Blind Watchmaker is one of, if not the, most popular of his books. It's been waiting on my bookshelf for a long time, but I tend to buy books faster than I can consume them. I'm trying to resist the urge to go buy a few new ones today since I've got four or five on backlog at the moment. Sometimes I wish I could lock myself away in a remote and cozy log cabin in the snowy depths of winter and do little more than get lost in my books for a solid week.