A bit of light reading…

I’ve found there are two kinds of reading, and I enjoy both. One kind you have to rev up your brain. Whether it’s a complicated journal article, or a biography or piece of non-fiction that challenges the way you think. You don’t just read, you engulf, you surround, you engage.

The second kind of reading is leisurely and relaxed. The book kind of just flows over you. It’s ‘light reading’.

I’ve been doing a lot of the former reading, so over the weekend I treated myself to a bit of the latter reading. I read Arthur C. Clarke’s Songs of Distant Earth, and almost completed James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small.

I always enjoy a good Clarke Novel because they aren’t like your normal run of the mill Science Fiction. In other books you have your story line, your climax, and your resolution. In Clarke’s books nothing actually ever happens (think Rendezvous with Rama). But when you’re done, you feel like you’ve listened in on a few lectures in an introductory college physics course. I read about the space elevator, theoretical quantum engines, and interstellar space travel. Very entertaining.

And then of course reading James Herriot is almost like going on a vacation. I want to visit two places before I die, New Zealand, and England. New Zeland because I’ve heard from more than one person that it is paradise on earth, and England because of the way Herriot describes it in his books.

Anyway, I’ll likely finish up Herriot tonight, and then it’s back to every piece of peer reviewed literature on the topic of wikis I can find.