This blog is getting suspiciously heavy on the books

The new house is shaping up nicely. I have a cute little office, smaller than some people's closets, but good to go for me. The kitchen/dining room area is big. I hope that Sarah will put up some pictures once we've gotten rid of the last cardboard boxes.

After a couple of hours, I got our wireless DSL to play nice with Sarah's iMac. I also ordered a wireless USB adapter for the Windows/Linux computer. I've never had to configure wireless for Linux before and it has a nasty reputation. I read carefully and I'm pretty sure that I got a compatible piece of hardware. It'll be here in a few days.

I have about 12 library books. One of them is 3 early comedies by Shakespeare, so do I count it as 1 or 3? I'm reading Love's Labor's Lost right now, and I'm still munching my way through Quicksilver, but I'm looking forward to The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind, There Are Doors by Gene Wolfe, The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson, and Sin and Syntax, which is, I think, a writing guide. I still have a few books from the university library on my thesis topics as well. If I only talked about what I read, this would become a book review blog with little time for anything else.

But here's one more. Ron Suskind is the guy who wrote a famous article on President Bush and the reality-based community. A few weeks ago, his book The One Percent Doctrine: deep inside America's pursuit of its enemies since 9/11 came out to starred reviews and is hovering at the top of sales of Books in Amazon. Its primary thesis is that VP Cheney effected a shift in our foreign policy thinking. The one percent doctrine is the idea that when a threat to US national security crosses our radar, even if it has a low possibility of actually happening, we must treat it as if it were a hundred-percent certainty. The result of internalizing this doctrine is (and has been) overreaction to the various war-on-terror bugaboos (along with the obvious one, Saddam Hussein). Should be great reading.

Anyhow, when I heard about it, I tried to get it from the local library, but they didn't have it, so I requested the library buy it. I didn't expect anything to come of it, but lo and behold, it's since appeared in the library catalog and I have the first hold on it. Democracy does work!

I read on Suskind's website that he's visiting the Colbert Report this Thursday, so give it a watch.