Musing Mondays and "Wild Stories"

            

- I'm currently reading…

- Up next I think I’ll read…

- I bought the following book(s) in the past week…

- I'm super excited to tell you about (book/author/bookish-news)…

- I'm really upset by (book/author/bookish-news)…

- I can’t wait to get a copy of…

- I wish I could read ___, but…

- I blogged about ____ this past week…

THIS WEEK’S RANDOM QUESTION: What made you fall in love with reading?

PLEASE add your book comments at Books and a Beat, Thanks!

     I'm currently still reading the  "Wild Stories: The Best of Men's Journal- 2003" and loving it.  I have in the last week journeyed (crawled at times, run others) across the Sahara Desert with a lost runner in a race and he'd been separated from everyone else and anything recognizable by a sand storm.  "Crazy in The Desert" by Hampton Sides describes an Italian Mauro Prosperi and his amazing survival experience in the  Sahara Desert.  He survived in the Sahara for over a week before crossing a country's borders and trudging skeletal into a small village.  And now I have just finished an experience in the Alaska Yukon with Dog mushers preparing for the big race.  In "Far North" by John Balzar he describes how they drove up to within 100 miles of the North Arctic Circle and practiced with overeager dogs and their toboggans.  Falling off or more precisely being flung off from the toboggan on difficult turns seems to happen often.  Frostbite, chilled air turning into frozen breath and the crunch of snow and the sound of the dogs running on ice.  Truly a chilly recreation of where he was.  Half of me wishes I could just re-read that piece as I sit on my front porch in 90 degree weather with ice tea and my pots filled with flowers.

.

THIS WEEK’S RANDOM QUESTION: What made you fall in love with reading?

      I found in the little library in Elementary school in third grade a shelf of hard bound books made for kids on biographies of famous people.  Like Florence Nightingale and I believe George Carver.  (This was about a year after Martin Luther King was shot).  My love of reading took off as I read every single one.  Also my love of history.  It reminds me that I ought to delve more into biographies this summer and that I want to read "John Adams" by David McCullough this summer because my oldest daughter is working an internship at Plimoth Rock (actual spelling) on recreated colonial clothes and this Fall at a Revolutionary war museum dressed as a Colonial woman.  I was never very interested in that time period in America, but of all things Diana Gabaldon's latest books in the Outlander series caught my interest.  Book 5, "The Fiery Cross" and the ones after that are pre-Revolution to the American Revolutionary War- Diana Gabaldon's site and outline of Outlander series.  Reading about actual people will be far more interesting than the political and warfare stories we were taught in grade school.  It's a pet-peeve of mine, I wish history wasn't just a collection of political and war stories and that it was more the story of the people of a time period.  Perhaps things have changed since I went to school, but there was a clear divide between the two when I went- U.S. History and American Studies (or European History and European Studies) and I'd rather read about people who made a difference.