2012 is Slipping Away . . .

This being my first post of the not-so-new year, I feel abashed at how time has flown.  I could have been posting!  Well, I've not been completely idle, though being idle does come very naturally to the retired.  My band has released a CD/DVD (sorry, since I'm doing this anonymously, you won't be able to find it), and that's something of an accomplishment for the young year, though we recorded it nearly a year ago. I've read a couple of hefty books, spent two weeks on a road trip to Texas, and basked another week in the Grand Cayman sun.  I never did finish The Origin of Consciousness, but I did finish the much longer REAMDE by Neal Stephenson.  All right, I know, it's not fair to compare them.  Jaynes's tome is heavy with theory, historical analysis, weighty thought.  Stephenson's somewhat heavier tome is fiction, though it also has its share of theory, historical analysis, and weighty thought. But fiction it certainly is, and what kept me going was the cliff-hanging, movie serial structure of the narrative, where Stephenson would take a group of characters, toss them into Harm's Way and then take up another group and toss them into Harm's Way.  And then take up another.  And so on.  One became breathless.  So I eagerly flipped the thousand pages and finished the thing in record time (for me, the slow reader).  It was fun.  And that's about all I can say about it.  Clever, spritely, engaging fun.  I also put away (as in "consumed") two novels by Jane Smiley, whose writing I have admired of old.  Good Faith, set in the early 80's, is an eerie evocation of Bernie Madoff and his ilk, deftly pre-figured in the midst of a suburban development and S&L scandal, narrated by a winsome realtor.  Private Life traces the arc of a woman from late 19th century Missouri to the beginnings of World War II after her star is hitched to a comet-like astronomer who winds up his selfish quest in the throes of paranoia, convinced the Albert Einstein is stalking him in the town of Vallejo, CA.  Again, wonderfully written and well worth the time.