What I've been doing on my summer vacation

I just realized it’s been 1 ½ weeks since my last blog post. You’d think I’d have all the time in the world since I’m visiting my family in Topeka, Kansas right now. I’m one of those people, though, who gets the most done when I am really busy. If I have long blocks of unscheduled time then I get absolutely nothing done. Well . . . nothing productive that is. I’ve been engaging in plenty of reading for “personal enrichment”

I finished Karen Joy Fowler’s new book Wit’s End. She’s best known for writing The Jane Austen Book Club, but prior to that she was known in the scifi/fantasy community as writing fantastic historical fiction with a fantastical edge. Check out Sarah Canary and the PEN/Faulkner finalist Sister Noon. Unfortunately, I was disappointed with Wit’s End. She’s definitely seemed to abandon the fantasy realm and is directly placed herself in the genre of “intellectual chic lit.” It was a fun, quick read but not the heady stuff of her earlier work. Perfect for reading while lying next to my parents’ pool, though :)

I also bought the Anita Blake series graphic novel that is the prequel to the book series. (I guess every is jumping on the graphic novel bandwagon now.) Laurell K. Hamilton’s books have always been a guilty pleasure of mine. Part vampire fantasy, part romance, part action. Kind of like if a Joss Whedon script was tweaked by a Harlequin Romance writer. Fun stuff.

Right now I’m half way through Steven Johnson’s Everyting Bad is Good For You, a great non-fiction book about how pop culture is actually making us smarter. I love it when someone tells me all my TiVo-ing of Lost, 24, and Battlestar is helping to increasing my cognitive functions. Along the same line, I came across this interesting story that current pop culture demonstrates Americans are becoming more tolerant of gays and lesbians. While pop culture certainly can influence social attitudes, it also reflects general trends in society. This is especially apparent when we consider that the main goal of TV is commercial – it needs to sell itself to the audience and not offend too much.

I’ve also been following the possible upcoming end of the world through the advancement of science, how the media has portrayed race and gender in the current presidential primaries, how more authoritarian parental styles can cause kids to later be “bystanders to genocide,” good 'ole misogyny in the guise of promoting faith & abstinence, evidence that if you reply the history of life multiple times you'll get vastly different outcomes, and mulling over possible theories for the events of the crazy yet awesome season 4 Lost finale.

So basically the same dissertation avoidance techniques I use all the time!