Books and other stuff

More tulips from last week

Because I always love to look at pretty flowers, I'm putting in a couple more pictures from my visit to RoozenGaarde last week. I was planning to write a nice leisurely post about the books I'm currently reading, but after having spent a couple of frustrating hours creating a list of books and a profile in Shelfari in order to create a nice display for my blog, I gave up. The limitations of their widget are too difficult to deal with, at least for me.

Several of my blogging friends use Shelfari (which is an Amazon app, if I'm not mistaken). It gives me a chance to link to descriptions of the books, and I was quite pleased to see that I could also create a bookshelf for books I have read, am reading, and want to read. Here's a screen grab of what I was able to get:

What a lot of work it was to get this far! However, I am going to simply explain what books I've collected and why I feel like I have suddenly come upon an embarrassment of riches when it comes to reading. You know how you browse for a book and end up discovering a new author? It seems I've just discovered several. My friend Judy also gave me some books to read and I'll just put those on the bottom of the pile, since she's not in a hurry for their return.

If you enlarge that Shelfari list, you'll see that I'm currently reading four books. One is The End of Overeating, the corollary that follows from Mindless Eating, which I finished last week. I'm reading it in the evenings after snuggling into bed, and I pick it up from my nightstand and read until I get sleepy. (That can sometimes be quite a short time, so who knows how long I'll be reading it?) I've gotten my fill of books about food for the moment. Wish it were that easy to get full when I'm eating.

Judy also gave me a book last year that really turned me on to the mystery of numbers, especially prime numbers. I wrote about it here. In the comment section of that post, Entre Nous asked me whether I had read Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea yet, and today I picked it up at the bookstore. It had to be ordered. It looks fascinating! I read the first chapter on the bus and could hardly wait to delve into it.

But as soon as I got home and started to read The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, I was lost again, wanting to read THAT book. As you can see, I have definitely fallen into a period of being lost in several good books, and I felt inspired to share those riches with you. After spending way too much time on it, and being totally unable to figure out how to put a decent bookshelf widget on my sidebar, I have finally finished this post so I can explore my new treasures. But first, yet another gander at the flowers.

:-)