Books, Books, Books!

My blogging, if you've noticed, has been somewhat less voluminous as of late. I've been reading - a LOT. I just blasted (no pun intended) through Abigail Kohn's Shooters: Myths and Realities of America's Gun Cultures, done some selected reading from Prof. Saul Cornell's Whose Right to Bear Arms Did the Second Amendment Protect? (I skipped the last piece, authored by Michael Bellesiles), I read (with relish) Bill Whittle's Silent America: Essays from a Democracy at War (dead-tree edition - one essay per night,) and Apollo, by Charles Murray & Catherine Bly Cox, the story of the race to the moon from the perspective of the engineers tasked with getting us there - and back. That one ate a lot of hours normally dedicated to sleep. And I have been doggedly slogging through Prof. Randy Barnett's post-doctoral thesis, Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty. (I'm almost done with that one. It's my lunchtime reading, and it is NOT a light read.)

Over the Christmas/New Year's time off I read Hugh Hewitt's Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation that's Changing Your World. Hugh doesn't have a setting below "Wide Open" does he? Before that I managed to find a copy of Dr. Thomas Sowell's excellent Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. In between all of that, I've snuck in the stray novel or two. Or six.

So when I say I read a lot, you can understand why for my birthday my family and friends all gave me the perfect gift: Gift certificates to book stores. I just came back from Barnes & Noble. Today's selections:

William Gibson's Pattern Recognition

P.J. O'Rourke's Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

(Man, I read a lot of books with colons in the titles!)

I wasn't able to find a copy of James Webb's Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America - another colon-separated title. I'll have to order that, or see if they have a copy at the used book store. I haven't used that gift certificate yet.

Anyway, all that reading has been cutting into my writing time (because I haven't stopped reading off the blogs, or even slacked off much.) Hopefully I'll have some inspiration to write some more of my trademark Den Bestian-length essays, but I'm not promising anything at the moment.

(Now, which should I start reading first....)