But in the meantime...

...since I have been a recalcitrant poster lately, and mostly because posting is a more attractive option than buckling down and briefing the cases to be found within the less- fascinating- than- it- is- expensive Problems in Contract Law, which is what I should be doing, I thought I'd bridge the gap between now and when I can show off pictures of us baking in the heat at Farm Aid by offering a book review. Reviews, actually, in that there are two of them...not so much in that they offer much in the way of actual content analysis.

I mentioned a long time ago that we'd begun reading books together. This means aloud, to each other, and substitutes for the time we used to spend watching reruns of Six Feet Under or Arrested Development or otherwise multiplying our indebtedness to our local Mr. Movies. It also makes a useful bedtime routine for those of us who may have retained a night nurse's resistance to physically "winding down" in the evening (as my mother would call it). We've tried a variety of books, some of which lend themselves to it better than others, but none we have found so far have done so as well as the books by Bill Bryson.

A Walk in the Woods (or as I like to call it, for obvious reasons, The Bear Book) was the first of Bryson's that we read together. Not only was it witty and entertaining (Bryson has a very dry sense of humor that makes sense when you consider that he has alternated living his adult life in Britain and on the East Coast), it also rekindled (for Matt) / initiated (for me) an interest in nature and camping and general good old doing-without in the wilderness. It was this book that ignited our desire to go to the Delaware Water Gap, where we camped this weekend, alongside the Appalachian Trail--the hiking of which, by Bryson and a companion, forms the basis for the entire book. It's not a particularly sensational book, but it made us laugh, and want to camp and hike, and also raised awareness for certain environmental tragedies currently befalling the American landscape.

We're now in the midst of Notes from a Small Island, which Bryson has written about a trip he took through Britain. I find this to contain an even more incisive and hilarious degree of wit than the first book. Upon meeting a fellow boarder at a house where he's staying for the night, Bryson remarks about the person's name, "But it was one of those names only British people have – Colin Crapspray or Bertram Pantyshield." I had to put down the book and laugh, hard, for a good five minutes. It reminded me of when my brother used to hear me laughing out loud at books I was reading in bed by myself, and yell across the hallway what a nerd that made me. Ah, some things never change; but I actually do post these specifically with my brother in mind, because I think that the casual style and exceptionally dry wit of these books seem like something that would appeal to him. To anybody, really--we highly recommend them.