Lite Reading

As you know, I am busy reading Independence Days and How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It. The first is about food storage and preservation, and the second is about which guns to buy to stock your arsenal and how we should all invest in Pakistani medical kits, plenty of extra birth control, heirloom seeds and gold. SO I'll keep reading these things and reporting on them if there's anything of interest to a general readership.

In the meantime, in response to numerous recent requests on facebook about what to read, I will offer a list for myself and others. Surprisingly, I am a slow reader in my old age. It should not be surprising that most of the information I find useful in preparing for a possible catastrophe comes from history. I was thrilled with Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm. From this read, we can learn not to squabble pretending we know more than someone who could actually help us. We can also learn not to put off projects that we know need to be done "someday," and not to ignore warnings of imminent doom. I recommend it. Like the other of Larson's books that I have read, Devil in the White City, it starts out slow but pays off if you stick with it. The last line makes the whole read worth it.

Lately, I haven't finished anything else of note since the nice post-apocalypse utopia in After the Fall, which I read during Nevada Day weekend. Really, the only post-apocalypse aspect of After the Fall is its story of wanting to get back to your family, and how people who know how to do things can work together to accomplish good. Not for consumption by people who don't want to read about a lesbian main character.

Before that, it was summertime and I was reading Divergent (shout out to HydroJen's Book Envy blog!), The Urban Homestead and a couple of books about the Salem witch trials. I suppose it was those books that got me interested in thinking about building a skill set for a different economy. Which you may have noticed I'm not building. I'm just thinking about it.

Of course you're already familiar with the now-classic The Hunger Games, which teaches us how to prioritize in a pinch.

Other than that, books upcoming on my reading list are more by James Wesley Rawles: Patriots, and of course Alas, Babylon (recommended by Miss Gokey, whose name nearly escaped this post...). If I think of anything else useful, I will update. Until then, may as well practice reading like in the old days, from pages and not from a screen. But don't do that for too long, or I'll lose my loyal readers! Hahaha.