To combat the brainsuck effect of summer, I went to the library today and got a stack of books on the recommendations of my awesome friends. I already crunched through three over the past few days: Shadows in the Street by Susan Hill, Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, and The Summons by John Grisham. The Hill and Grisham novels were throwaway page-turners, and I finished them in a day each. Both were good, and the Grisham won a special place in my heart because it's protagonist was a professor of law (what I'd ultimately like to study) at the University of Virginia (where I'll be in a few months) with the last name of Atlee (which is the name of an awesome lit professor I had last summer). Bad Science was an interesting non-fiction read about a variety of things that claim to be science and totally aren't, like homeopathy, anti-vaccine sentiment, and some others, plus some really interesting stuff on the placebo effect. I suggest it.
What I plan on doing is this: everytime I finish one of the books in my new to-read pile I'll do a review/critique/analysis/whatever I feel like about it. I'm not sure what I'll be tackling first, it's either City of Thieves by David Benioff (who wrote the screen play for Game of Thrones, which is a wicked HBO tv series) or Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (auther of Everything is Illuminated and Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close). I'll be starting tomorrow, and my first review should be done by Thursday!
