And now for (reading) something completely different

I was taking a look at my progress on my somewhat absurdly long reading list -- and realized that I have three more to go in order to have knocked off 100 from the list (just not in precisely the order that I had laid out).  It definitely goes in periods where I am enjoying quite a few of the books and then times (like now) where I am finding fault with most of the books.

At any rate, after I get through these three (ending on Laferrière Heading South), I think I will take a bit of a break to read some non-fiction.  I have vast number of urban studies books which I have mostly skimmed.  I might pick just a handful to read.  They would probably be on a separate list, since I don't think I will want to be completely prescriptive in how I interlace my fiction and non-fiction reading.

Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle is a book I have been meaning to read for literally decades.  It is probably more like 15 years for DeVoto's selection of the Journals of Lewis and Clark.  I think it is time to fit them in somehow.

However, I am going to start by rereading* Calder's Einstein's Universe and then tackle Hawking's A Brief History of Time.  (Some study put this at the number one or two spot of books that were purchased and never finished -- or even begun.  In my defense, I didn't actually buy the book...)  I did, however, buy Neil Degrasse Tyson's Death by Black Hole while at the planetarium side of the Natural History Museum on our recent trip to New York.  I am probably going to enjoy Death by Black Hole more than Hawking's book, but if I read Tyson first, then I will never read the Hawkster.  I expect that it will take me a while to get through all of them.  I may post on more scientific topics for a while, or I may use the break from fiction as a chance to catch up on a number of reviews and musings that I have simply not gotten around to over the past month.

* I actually had read up on quite a bit of Einstein's theory of relativity in my teens, and recently thought that it might be something my kids would be interested in as they got into more serious science at school (you never know).  I happened to be in the science section at Powells (on my only trip to Portland while living out in Vancouver) and picked up a few books on the subject.