My current books

Right now I am in a felicitous place where I'm reading two books, each of which is flowing pretty well, on top of my morning Bible reading (and Mark out in Seattle reminded me that he had given me Robert Alter's translation of Genesis, so I switched over to that for the time being). 

On the literary side, I am reading Claire Messud's Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, which starts off autobiographical. It's entirely possible that if I didn't know Claire, I wouldn't enjoy it as much as I am, but I do know her, so it's giving me a lot of background on why she is as she is and was as she was and it's just well written. Her level of recall of little details from growing up is fairly astounding. More than anything, this book makes me wonder about what we talked about when we were in college. I spent a fair amount of time talking to her back then, especially my junior year, her senior year. It's entirely possible that this whole level of detail about her family and backstory is new to me now because I forgot it all, but it's also possible that it never came up in conversation because we didn't ask about that stuff when we were younger, it didn't seem important, that the future loomed larger than the past, or that I was just trying to impress her and was at some level blinded and intimidated by her level of worldliness and sophistication. Or that we were just amusing one another.

On the business side I am making my way through Telephone by John Brooks. Brooks -- for decades one of the New Yorker's main business writers -- wrote this book in 1978 on the 100th anniversary of the telephone, apparently on a somewhat commissioned basis from AT&T, at that time a if not the colossus of American business. And honestly, if I just stopped there, it would be enough. The book is a profound reminder of how much things change over decades and centuries, how one industry can be dominant and then fall. But it's also full of lots of fine tidbits, as books written by good writers always are.