Today's confessional, I've finished three books finished since I last posted an update.

Robert D. Kaplan's Soldiers of God covers the war in Afghanistan, not the recent bombing of the Taliban, but their war with the Soviet Union in the late 80's. He does a good job of showing what he saw there as he travelled with the various Mujahidin groups. I'm way too much of a wimp to be a war journalist, especially in a war where covering it meant hiking for days up and down mountains to get into the country. He's doing a reading tonight at the UW bookstore for his latest book, Imperial Grunts, and I'm planning to go.

We had to read a chapter of David M. Levy's Scrolling Forward for class last month. It discusses the changing role of documents in the modern world. The subject was interesting and the chapter was well-written, especially compared to a lot of the other readings we did for that class, so I checked it out of the library and finished it yesterday. I'll probably never look at a cash register receipt the same.

Michael Bishop's Brittle Innings had been my transit/waiting room/etc book for some time. I'm not really into baseball but I enjoyed it. I now need to read Frankenstein. (If you want to figure out how those last two sentences relate to each other, read the book).
posted by Kristin Buxton at 1:56 PM