Antisocial weekends are good for reading.

Peter Carey's Wrong about Japan is a slight memoir about him and his son learning about Japanese culture via anime. Not as good as his novels, but cute.

Alan Weisman's history of Gaviotas made me want to visit. Gaviotas is a town built in the middle of Columbia where they've developed technologies for the third world. I'm not sure entirely of its current status, but it's been a bit of a utopia for a lot of people throughout the years.

George R. Stewart's Earth Abides is one of the classics of post-apocalyptic literature. In this case it was a flu that wiped out most of humanity. Not bad, but I probably would have enjoyed it more earlier in my life (and before I read so many of the more recent takes on the end of humanity).

Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot was a quick read. It's a bunch of essays about, mostly, American History. Probably wouldn't have been worth buying, but it was a fun read from the library.

T.C. Boyle's After the Plague was another one of those books of short stories that I didn't read straight through, so I honestly don't remember much about the early stories in the book. A few were memorable though, like the one about the black and white sisters who tried to make everything in their world black or white. The last story in the book is the title story. It provided a mildly amusing contrast with Earth Abides since it accomplished much of the same thing as the novel but in a much shorter form.
posted by kristin at 10:47 AM