I'm doing a bunch of reading.

Part of this is that I'm in my typical mid-February allergy season - the elms are flowering and I feel kind of cruddy and un-energetic. But reading is one thing that I can handle.

Three of the books I'm reading have an odd, tangentially-coincidental relationship. First, I am still working (but nearly am done) with The Pickwick Papers. I'm still enjoying it; it's a very entertaining novel.

Then, I am re-reading the first Thursday Next novel (The Eyre Affair). I read this a long time ago for the book club and decided recently I wanted to re-read it, so I could then read the sequels. And I find that there's a lot of the in-jokes I missed, even some fairly obvious ones (like Paige Turner) on the first read. The link to Pickwick Papers is that Thursday Next has a genetically-engineered pet, a reconstruction of a dodo, which is named Pickwick.

And then finally, after hearing David Quammen speak on Tuesday night, and having him autograph my copy of "The Song of the Dodo" ("Ecology for an ecologist" he wrote in it, which I think was nice) I realized I had enjoyed it so much the first time, I wanted to re-read it. So I'm reading a book that (at least briefly) mentions dodos.

(Which I think, could any recently-extinct species be brought back from the dead, they would be one of my picks. Along with the mammoth. And maybe the thylacine. Oh, and whatever the creature that Nessie was purported to be - the big aquatic dinosaur thing)

Those are my "bedtime" reading. My "work" reading (the stuff I read in the evenings/afternoons when I'm done with my other work and there's nothing good on tv, which is most of the time these days) are the directed-readings books my students chose. Luckily most of them (I have a lot this semester) picked books I am familiar with already. But I did finish "An Urchin in the Storm" by Stephen Jay Gould last night.

Gould. Not to sure what to say about him. He was a brilliant mind but he could be as cranky as all get-out, and since this book is a series of essays inspired by books he reviewed for various magazines, he's at his crankiest here.

I don't always find "cranky" that fun to read. It's funny, I read lots of Gould as a student and I never realized what an opinionated coot he was.

I also just began another book - Roy Porter's "The Greatest Benefit to Mankind." This is presented as a history of medicine and I probably would never have chosen to read it if a student hadn't picked it because (a) it's just over 700 pages long and (b) I figured "history of medicine" would mean long articles about Koch and Lister and Jenner and that lot, and I have to admit that biography leaves me a little bit cold. But actually the book - at least as far as I'm into it - is really a history of humankind, with an emphasis on how disease and early medicine affected cultures. Already I've learned several things about malaria I did not know already (I was vaguely aware there were different forms - tertian and quotidian fevers, and there are different strains of the protozoan that cause it, some worse than others), but I wasn't aware it had been present (well, the weaker terian form) in the British fenlands, and that it was apparently brought to Mesoamerica by the conquistadores.

(There are also chapters yet to come on medicine in India, China...other cultures with different attitudes from our own).

And despite the fact that it's a huge, brick like book, it's written in a way that makes it very readable, that makes you want to keep reading on it. And I feel like there's stuff in here I will be able to incorporate into my teaching. So though it's going to require extended attention and work to get through the thing in time for the student's coming in to discuss it, it seems to be an interesting book.