Books

What am I reading this week? First, my LSAT study book. Second, again - my LSAT study book. Third, I have a diversion - A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester. The third book is so interesting. It is about the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. Actually, the book is about our world . . . the outer and the inner, the upper and the lower, from outer space to us looking out.

It's really a fantastic book.

Here's a wee excerpt (where the author quotes Lewis Thomas, a great American biologist and philosopher):

Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dry as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming, membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos.

If you could look long enough, you would see the swirling of the great drifts of white cloud, covering and uncovering the half-hidden masses of land. If you had been looking for a very long, geologic time, you could have seen the continents themselves in motion, drifting apart on their crustal plates, held afloat by the fire beneath.

It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun.