I just finished “Too Much of a Good Thing”, by Dan Kindlon, Ph. freakin’ D., which is his book decrying our New Gilded Age’s (his term) parenting failures deriving from over-indulging our kids. I don’t disagree with his premise at all, and in the book he makes some fine points, but this is a half-page Op-Ed piece crammed into a 200 page book. It is rambling, the “real life examples” he trots out from his own practice don’t consistently support his point, and he commits the final, and great sin of basing this all on what sounds (to me anyway) on a poorly constructed “statistical study”, complete with cool title and snazzy acronym, with, I guess, the hope that by associating some number, any number, to his conjecture, he can give it a scientific gloss. Like I say, if his point is that by over-indulging our kids instead of trying to really connect with them, we hold back from them the main treasure that they crave, I’m a believer. But the pseudo-science gets on my nerves.

Completed Balzac’s “Pere Goriot”. I am not well-schooled on Balzac, and this particular volume (from a Franklin Library series of hardback “Great Literature”) read like a bad translation and lacked any introduction or annotations. I am embarrassed to admit that I was constantly getting turned around by the names, and only a few of the characters really stood out for me. (I added the book to the “to-be-read basket” because of an allusion to Rastignac in Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge” … and, thankfully, at least I always managed to stay clear on that particular character.) The final chapters worked well, I thought, and compensated for what I felt was the uneven structure and pacing of the early part of the book.

I am lurching toward a new site design that is driven off of my WordPress-powered blog.  This works well for a lot of my previous pages and site usage.  It is a problem for the puzzle pages, which often include running “Solvers”.  For these, I’ve added a section to the sidebar for ‘Puzzle Pages’, and am slowly but surely shoehorning the popular ones (the Jumble, Scramble Squares, and Word Mining solvers in particular) into a page with a design based on the blog.  After managing that, the site should require far less maintenance attention from me.

As mentioned in the last post, I am resolved to buy no more books until I read the unread volumes spilling out of the big basket in my office. The inventory of these can be viewed on My Library at LibraryThing (the Borges was a late edition addition … I didn’t remember that I’d ordered it.) Those books currently “in process” are listed in the sidebar after all the other stuff.

Today I finished A. Conan Doyle’s ‘The Lost World‘. A fun read from the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Like the Holmes stories, this book has spawned an apparently endless parade of sequels, films, and derivative works, nicely summarized in the Wikipedia entry. Almost 100 years of paleontology and evolution in cinematic special effects make the story seem a little quaint sometimes. The cultural racism and anti-semitism just under the surface can make it uncomfortable at times … attitudes we like to think belong to a bygone day. I can’t remember what led me to this book, although it may have been part of a nice display of Oxford Classics at the local Barnes & Noble, or the swarm of dinosaur drawings in my portfolio.

But … done. On to other things. 1 book read, 55 to go.

A number of changes are coming at me all at once. Probably the most immediate is my return to Big Company work, ending a five-year experiment in independent consultancy that has been usually fun and astoundingly non-remunerative. As a result I’ve retired the Consultancy link from the site, along with the resume page. Since that leaves much of the site devoted to me talking to myself, I am also starting to work the entire thing over to a standard Blog layout. This may take some time since I have to get drawings and puzzle scripts moved and have yet to learn the WordPress tricks to do all of that.

I am also taking a cold, hard look at the basket of book purchases mounting up in the corner of my office. I seem to be better at buying books than reading them and the backlog is starting to take on a threatening aspect. So I have resolved to go cold turkey on my book-buying habit until I read what I already have (the only exception being my book club’s monthly selection … sometimes I have it but often I don’t). To organize the effort, I entered all 55 of these books into my LibraryThing collection, and you will be able to find a listing of what is currently being read in the sidebar under all the other stuff (I have a very bad habit of reading several books at once). I will post short reviews of everything I finish as I go, and I invite your comments.

Interspersed with a maddening amount of networking and interviewing since mid-January has been a lot of truly enjoyable work creating a blog to promote my father’s recent book “If Instead of Apes, We’d Come from Grapes, We Wouldn’t Just Yet Be Wine” The blog is called “Light Verse for a Heavy Universe“, and quickly evolved from a site promoting the book to one that is providing an outlet for all sorts of Al’s work. In the past few weeks, my sister Barbara and I have entered over 100 poems and drawings for the site, leaving me more accomplished with a flatbead scanner and MacroMedia Fireworks than I ever thought I’d be.

Finally, I retired my Linux PC in favor of a refurbished iMac DV … upgraded to OSX Tiger and 512MB RAM, as well as a standard Apple keyboard and Kensington USB mouse (the keyboard that came with the iMac was like a toy, and the mouse was round, which I found confusing to work with). I still have to track down some desktop tools (a word processor in particular), and will probably pick up a copy of iWork on eBay.