Summer reading part whatever

 

The glorious plan was to run through my thoughts on my vacation reading right here on clerkmanifesto. So I let my vacation end, set down to work, and, like so many things, it was way harder than it looked!

But I'm no quitter!

Well, I mean, I am sometimes, and sometimes I'm not. Quitting is the appropriate response to so many things in life. Like, say you're a smoker. Smoking is bad for you. Exclaiming "I'm no quitter!" doesn't really offer much to anyone and might not be the personality statement you thought it was.

So I am a quitter. But sometimes I'm not. It just depends. And, as far as it goes with running through the account of my vacation reading I AM NOT A QUITTER!

I mean, not yet.

Here are the next two books on my list:

Encore Provence by Peter Mayle

and

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

Encore Provence was just the kind of cozy book I assumed I'd read on vacation. It unchallengingly tells of the author's continuing adventures of living in Provence as an English transplant. I started it. It seemed pleasant enough and I am pretty sure I had read it in the past at some point. But I was at a bookstore in Duluth and stumbled on some meaty Pulitzer Prize winner about a scribe/book collector during the time of Renaissance Italy who managed to find an old bit of Roman Poetry that went on to rock the world. It was called The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. This is usually the kind of thing I drag home thinking I'll read, but don't.

But then I bought it and took it to the hotel room and read it!

Weird.

You're probably thinking it must have been great.

Well, I wanted it to be. 

It was interesting. I learned some things about Epicurus and Pope Culture and manuscripts in the middle ages.

But mostly I was just really keen to impress everyone when I came back here to report on what I'd read during vacation.