Relocation log, 2010

I've been going through my old application files, and I've got records of employment, academic activity, residence, etc sort of spread out all over the country. There's just been a ridiculous amount of moving for the past few years. One other thing I've been doing is making lists of my nightstand reading material randomly documented for the last 3 moves. They're assortments of books, pamphlets, mags or other written material at various points, which have served as kind of an interesting snapshot of my life each move....

Bville, 2009:


Ray Carver - A New Path to the Waterfall
Yehuda Amichai - Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems
Watchman Nee - The Normal Christian Life
T. Austin Sparks - The Time in Which We Live
Khaled Hosseini - Kite Runner
Arturo Zychlinsky - Novel cell death program leads to neutrophil extracellular traps
Holy Bible


And Bville, 2010 (after moving into the house):


Watchman Nee - Spiritual Exercise
David Shenk - The Immortal Game
William P. Young - The Shack
Li-Young Lee - The City in Which I Love You
Adrienne Rich - The Dream of a Common Language
Ursula K. Leguin - A Wizard of Earthsea
Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights
Anna Ahkmatova - A Stranger to Heaven and Earth
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo
Holy Bible

(Man, was I going through a power-female author schtick back in 2010 or what?)


Lexington, 2010:


Alan Paton - Cry, the Beloved Country
Thomas More - Utopia
Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince
Terry Deary - The Groovy Greeks
Terry Deary - The Rotten Romans
Martin Amis - The Moronic Inferno
Intervarsity Press - Likewise (story sampler)
Urbana '06 Bible
Kaplan GRE Premiere Exam Book


A much more unintelligible collection here. Basically an assortment of books from high school, and everywhere else you can think of, that got stuffed into my nightstand/chest before my folks moved up here. Cry, the Beloved Country is a library loaner though, and the Kaplan GRE book was stuck in there after took the test last year. The Terry Deary books are actually pretty entertaining. Taught me everything I knew about Greek and Roman history back in 5th (6th?) grade. 


As for Mr. Amis' book.....I bought it anticipating that I would read it for Ms. Butz' research paper assignment back in 11th grade.....and then swung in favor of a book that was already on Sparknotes.com, once the grading rubrics were handed out (if you are a former Dulles AP student reading this, please join me as I smirk). I tossed it somewhere in our house in Houston, and did not seen it again until two days ago. I flipped it open to chapter 2 today, "The Killings in Atlanta." I expected a novel, but it reads like newspaper journalism. Somewhere in the third paragraph, I read this line:


"Conversation about murder in America is as stoical and routine as talk about the weather."


Really? I would replace "murder" with "bombing Iraq" or "HMO's" or "strangling George W. Bush in his sleep" (at least back then, that's what people would've been saying, more or less). Whatever the case, it's 7 years since I bought this book, and I still have no idea why it was written. Apparently, it's about America, so I guess that's a start. I checked the copyright, and it was dated 1986. So there you have it--suddenly, it makes sense that they were more concerned about murders in Atlanta rather than finding yellow cake in Iraq. Anyway, it's too late to process any more of this....so America, I'm putting a bookmark in 1986 and going to bed.


Buenas noches.